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Hi All,

Didn't know who better to ask about a problem I am having than experts like you

I have a problem with some compact flash cards that I have formatted FAT on a WIN XP machine.

The cards contain an operating system Win CE 3.0 Runtime and is used in a touchscreen along with Clarity software.

I had some corrupt files on a card and formatted it then copied all the files from a working card, now all I get is 'Disk Error, Press any key to restart '.

I am guessing I am doing something stupid here but I have tried everything within my very limited capabilities.

Any help would be gratefully received as I have 4 of these units now and only 1 working card.

Thanks in advance.

Hi,

Did the files become corrupt because the compact flash cards are developing hardware failures? These cards don't last forever (every write causes wear), and to help avoid early failures most implement some sort of "wear levelling". This wear levelling mostly means that everything fails at the same/similar time (rather than some failing much earlier and some failing much later). The simple solution would be to replace the compact flash cards.

For the "press any key" problem, if there isn't any USB or PS/2 ports (e.g. "touchscreen only") then there's no way you can press a key.


Cheers,

Brendan

Hi Brendon,

Thanks for the reply.

The first card that was a problem would boot up, if just didn't recognise the printer that it is programmed to run.

The second card also did similar so I took another card from a working unit and tried doing the same proceedure on that. This card also now has the same fault

I am a real noob at this but is it like a computer hard drive where you need boot files and if so, how would I go about it.

Thanks.

Phil.

We use CF flash devices for our terminals, and I can say the quality is different,. Some brands easily develop bad sectors while others seems not to (and that cannot be wear since it can happen on almost new devices). It could also be connected to the hardware in the computer, I don't know, but nonetheless all CFs are not the same.

Brendan wrote:Hi,

Did the files become corrupt because the compact flash cards are developing hardware failures? These cards don't last forever (every write causes wear), and to help avoid early failures most implement some sort of "wear levelling". This wear levelling mostly means that everything fails at the same/similar time (rather than some failing much earlier and some failing much later). The simple solution would be to replace the compact flash cards.

If the CF is formatted with FAT, there is no wear levelling. FAT will wear out certain sectors, especially the FAT allocation table sectors, and sectors of frequently updated files.

Are you using something like windows explorer to copy the files? If this CF card is the boot device, there is sure to be boot code that isn't being copied around...

Hi TJ,

This is my conclusion too, I am thinking that when I formatted the CF cards I have got rid of the boot sectors, so just copying the files from the other card will be pointless.

I will be needing to make the CF card bootable again before copying the files over, this I do not know how to do

I read that I could use DiskPrep but this does not work with XP and that is the only PC I have with a CF card reader :S

Any ideas

Phil.

Another problem you might have to consider is that an USB CF reader will not have the same idea about CHS values as an CF mounted as an IDE/SATA-disk. This means that any values based on CHS (cylinder, head, sectors) might be written in different ways with the USB reader vs with the IDE/SATA driver. Things like partition tables will have both CHS and LBA values, and depending on the OS used, might interpret the results either using CHS or LBA, which might create conflicting ideas of where things are on the CF.