Question for the masses.
I have my car PC running XP Pro on a 4Gb CF II ripped from a Creative Labs MuVo II Mp3 player and no 2.5 hard drives installed. Its all built on a VIA MII 10000 board with an IDE / CF II converter mounted up front, along with the onboard CF II and PCMCIA slots in the back. Took some work to get it running, but I have to admit it is pretty cool once it became stable. I can pull the drive and stick it in my pocket when I leave the car and everything important goes with me. I can also swap it out for my 1Gb CF card and run Linux OS for some hard core war driving applications.
Problem I have is this; Microsoft obviously does not want us to have this ability to take our OS with us in our pocket on removable media. This is made clear soon as you try and load Office or automatic updates. When you try to install Office to a removable drive, it prompts you for the CD at completion of the install process. Yes I had the CD in the drive, but it will keep prompting you until you want to throw the system through a window.. You hit cancel and it removes the install. After some online research I found no work around only others asking similar questions Then I decided to Ghost the CF from a 2.5 drive. This works great initially. You just install your XP and applications to the 2.5 drive, then insert the CF II drive and copy the running image to it. Tricked you M$ I said.
So far so good, when I booted to the CF drive all is well and running, except for a page file. Seems once windows detects the OS on the removable drive, it can’t figure where to put it. Disabled the page file and it runs fine. Now I go to do windows automatic updates and once again M$ comes back to haunt me, “updates failed bla bla bla” . I don’t want to re-ghost my drive every time a new bug or hole shows up in their OS. I also noticed a few other apps I’ve tried to install halted when they saw C:”removable”. The system has ran stable with my current config for 3 months so I know this will work.
I’ve also tried changing drivers, BIOS settings, file systems NTFS and FAT32, changing CF cards, different versions of Windows back to 98, nothing will change the drive type from removable. Have not tried different IDE to CF adapters since this one from Ituner’s is all ready mounted in the case.
http://store.mini-box.com/ituner/cfdisk1c.html
I did find that the new MuVo II players with the 4Gb drive have the CF function disabled, this is the only thing I have not tried yet.
So what’s the fix here, is there something easy I am missing?
How can we fake XP to think this CF II drive is a standard ATA/IDE hard drive?
Has anyone else found this same problem with say a USB connected hard drive?
What about XP Embedded, anyone running it and office on a removable media?
Sorry for the length, wanted to dump it all on the table to ponder
NOS
