Why do some compact flash cards not boot?

Forum: DSL Embedded
Topic: Why do some compact flash cards not boot?
started by: icepick

Posted by icepick on Sep. 08 2007,10:24

Hi all,
I have an old windows based terminal and I managed to succesfully boot DSL from a compact flash card.. however.. I noticed that the booting only seems to work from my kodak 32mb compact flash cards.. if I copy the contents to sandisk it doesnt work.. I use loadlin from ms-dos to do the booting.. and of course I format the card with format /s ..
Any ideas why kodak works and sandisk doesnt?

Alex

Posted by WDef on Sep. 10 2007,16:19

This problem with flash drives comes up time and again. The issue is often to do with differing BIOS and not with the usbstick itself. Sizes can be reported differently by different BIOS.

For an explanation see < http://home.graffiti.net/jaclaz:....ck.html > :

under:

'LET'S GET TECHNICAL

The BIOS geometry problem.'

Posted by SteveDSL on Sep. 27 2007,03:04

I don't know if this is true for Linux, but a couple years ago I was working in Embedded XP and had the same problem trying to boot from flash cards. Turns out XP would not allow booting from a CF that was set as 'removable'. It took a utility from the manufacturer to change the setting in the CF to 'fixed'. Some cards came that way already which is why some worked and some didn't. As I recall it was a pain to get the utility for some reason, involving NDAs, etc.

Posted by humpty on Sep. 28 2007,15:38

it's worth trying gparted live cd to do the partitioning.

Posted by WDef on Oct. 01 2007,20:54

gparted won't help if it's the BIOS geometry problem.