Thread: Using EWF on regular WinXP

The original I got (that doesn't work) is from acscontrol. I saw them mentioned a lot online so I figured it would be safe... So I just ordered one from that other site (I guess the forums automatically edit out the name). It sucks too, because I was all ready to roll. All I needed to do was copy the files over to the CF card and boot up!! I even acquired the SanDisk utility to modify the removable flag so that the drive is fixed. That way I can partition it in XP and don't need to run bootprep in dos, but because of the stupid IDE adaptor I can't even do that!

Think that sandisk utility works on other CF cards.

No, it's specifically for the new SanDisk models. You should contact your CF manufacturer's tech support to get their utility. Actually search google groups to see what other users did. You should find a lot of XPe developers talking about the removable bit or flag. Apparently you can order the "industrial" grade cards that come from the manufacturers preconfigured as fixed disks, but they tend to cost more. SanDisk only lists 3 places and they're not online stores for Joe Shmoe, so I don't know if that's possible for users like us. I wasn't sure beforehand, but I read tonight that EWF doesn't load when it sees it's trying to protect a removable drive. I thought I had read earlier that the whole point of RAM Reg mode was to support such devices that can't be partitioned, but I guess that wasnt' it. The utility I have is supposed to work on Ultra, UltraII, and Extreme cards. We'll see once I get my new CF-IDE adapter.

Okay... this is incredibly embarassing but... my CF-IDE is okay. The problem is that I was using the new style IDE cables when instead you need to use the older ones. News to me. Luckily I had an old cable lying around from an old PC I gutted. So now I have an extra 1GB disk and another CF-IDE adapter on the way... awesome. I guess I'll use them for my next project. Anyways, here's the process I used to deploy my OS to CF:

1) Get a DOS bootdisk and put bootprep from XPe on it.
2) I set up my system with the CF card by itself on the primary controller and my DVD and HDD on the secondary controller. Since my slim DVD can only be master, my HDD was slave.
3) Boot up to DOS and run fdisk, then format c:, and finally run bootprep /dc (/dc denotes the c drive, /dd d drive, and so on).
4) Copy the files from your HDD to your CF. I used knoppix to do a copy. Don't just use the DOS copy command because it'll ignore hidden files. Using knoppix it was pretty quick. Originally I tried partimage on knoppix until I realized it wasn't worth the extra steps.
5)Shutdown and remove your HDD. Reboot and it should boot into XP from your CF card. The first time you boot it MAY not load EWF properly. I think this happened for me because I had my HDD still plugged in, but I just shutdown, removed it, rebooted, and EWF was back fine.

That's it!! If you're having problems re-partition your disk and run format c: /s to make it boot into DOS just to see if you can boot up period. If you don't have a utility to turn your removable drive into a fixed drive you should be fine with the directions I gave you. I'm running my system with FAT32 because that's what MSFT recommends for speed and less overhead when running on a CF card. If you want to use NTFS you need to turn your card into a fixed disk and you don't need to run bootprep.

It seems pretty quick to me, but then again I can only compare it to my ****ty old Maxtor drive. My SanDisk cards supports DMA show up in XP as using Multi-Word DMA Mode 2) whereas some other cards only use PIO which isn't so good. No benchmarks yet because I'm still tuning... okay, I've been getting about 17-19 second cold boots.

Have fun!!!

SFiorito, knubile

I was looking for something to boost up my xp carputer. and you guys have done it.. Ordering my CF card and adapter today

Just need to tweak the boot speed about 10 secs more and that will be impressive.

Hey knubile, you get your card yet?

I don't know how much faster we can get without faster flash cards. My system is currently running on the slower of two cards I own. Tonight I'll test it out on the faster card. SanDisk has an even faster card coming out very soon so that should be really sweet!! Some people have talked about making a front end as the default shell. That MAY speed things up, but only if the shell is quick to startup itself, otherwise it'll be the bottleneck instead of explorer. Tonight I'll also do a bootvis trace to see what exactly is slowing it down, because loading the drivers and such goes by pretty quickly. Once the progress bar hits the end it sits there and thinks for a few seconds. Hopefully it's something that can be tweaked. One thing I'm worried about is all the devices I plan on having plugged in: GPS, XM, FM, WiFi, etc. That's going to slow things down as well probably. We'll see.

I have my card. No adapter though. I'm going to tweak the install on my laptop drive now while I wait. Running bootvis as I type. Next step, minlogon.
I want to try to get away without using hibernation. It's amazing, but the current front ends don't work very well with it.
So as a temporary measure, I'd like to avoid hibernation altogether.

I think you could do without hibernation. It's only like 1 or 2 seconds faster on mine so it's not a huge difference. I don't know if BootVis will do anything for flash cards since they've got hardly any seek time. I've tried running it on mine, but it made no difference. I just tried running defrag and disabling automatic chkdsk on bootup. That shaved off another second or so since chkdsk was running every bootup. It thinks the drive is corrupted I guess due to EWF. If you've got a bootlog.txt file on your c: drive it's running. Search for BootExecute in your registry and just remove the entry.

Standby is fast as hell with the CF card... WOW!!! I'm guessing it's due to the flash disk no spin up time? And my powersupply fan even shuts down, whereas with the HDD it stayed on. I'm just going to use standby in my car! The Opus will automatically shut off if the battery gets low, right? Don't need to worry about clean shutdown with EWF anyways. Awesome!