Jump to content

Compaq TC1000 won't boot from CF card larger than 504 MB!


ppgrainbow

Recommended Posts

Hey there! I recently got a technician to install a 32 GB Compact Flash memory card in which 29.8 GB is supposed to be usable, but I'm faced with a new problem.

The BIOS isn't even properly recognising most of the 29.8 GB, but according to BootITNG 1.87 and MS-DOS 8.0 FDISK, only the first 504 MB is recognised! To make matters worse, FDISK from MS-DOS 7.1 is only recognising the first 24 MB of the CF card! :(

I paid nearly $80 for a 32 GB CF card and an additional $4 for a Compact Flash to IDE adapter and I would absolutely hate to see that I wasted $84 on something that does not work correctly, if not at all.

The Compact Flash card on the CF-to-IDE adapter is identified as a Sandisk 32 GB Extreme CompactFlash memory card with the model number SDCFX-032G-A61 and the BIOS identifies it as a QalDisi QDAFX-030G-(PM).

I am using the CF card as bootable to attempt to reinstall Windows XP SP1 from the MS-DOS 7.1 prompt on the Compaq TC1000, but it turns out that the BIOS isn't even cooperating at all. In the main section of the BIOS, the BIOS version is 0F13 (BIOS date 2003-10-06) with the KBC version of 19.29. Serial number and asset tags are identified as KRD33905DJ.

Would I have to use a dynamic drive overlay (DDO) to get the CF card in the Compaq TC1000 to recognise properly or other methods to get the CF card recognised at full capacity?

If so, please post your thoughts as I'm looking for answers here.

:)

Update: The BIOS continues to misidentify the SanDisk 32 GB card as "QalDisk QDAFX-030G-(PM)". What's worse is the when I attempt to write the boot partition on the CF card, and when I either reboot or press CTRL-ALT-DELETE, all of the changes are lost!

I already destroyed the 30 GB hard drive and is on the virge of ditching the Compaq TC1000 if issues aren't fixed. :(

Edited by ppgrainbow
Link to comment
Share on other sites


Would I have to use a dynamic drive overlay (DDO) to get the CF card in the Compaq TC1000 to recognise properly or other methods to get the CF card recognised at full capacity?

Yes!

Ditto for the Hard Drive.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Would I have to use a dynamic drive overlay (DDO) to get the CF card in the Compaq TC1000 to recognise properly or other methods to get the CF card recognised at full capacity?

Yes!

Ditto for the Hard Drive.

Thank you for telling me.

Which dynamic drive overlay software utility should I use to at least boot MS-DOS 7.1 and then install Windows XP? Just curious.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have some DDOs for this purpose on my Website. BOOTMAN to support up to 2TiB and BOOTMAN2 to support up to 512TiB.

Some Hard drive manufacturers provided them but often for their Drives only and at least one gave DDOs a bad name by making the Hard Drive unreadable everywhere else. You are on your own with these.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have some DDOs for this purpose on my Website. BOOTMAN to support up to 2TiB and BOOTMAN2 to support up to 512TiB.

Some Hard drive manufacturers provided them but often for their Drives only and at least one gave DDOs a bad name by making the Hard Drive unreadable everywhere else. You are on your own with these.

Thanks for the help. First of all, can I have the link to the BOOTMAN DDO utility?

By the way, I'm using a utility called MHDD 4.6 and detected that the CF drive has zero sectors! So, something could be wrong here. :(

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have some DDOs for this purpose on my Website. BOOTMAN to support up to 2TiB and BOOTMAN2 to support up to 512TiB.

Some Hard drive manufacturers provided them but often for their Drives only and at least one gave DDOs a bad name by making the Hard Drive unreadable everywhere else. You are on your own with these.

Thanks for the help. First of all, can I have the link to the BOOTMAN DDO utility?

By the way, I'm using a utility called MHDD 4.6 and detected that the CF drive has zero sectors! So, something could be wrong here. :(

There is no link to the BOOTMAN DDO Package that you would need as it is not free.

There is a Demo with documentation at:

http://rloew1.no-ip.com/Programs/Bootman.htm

This Demo won't work in your Computer. It extends the BIOS limit from 137GB to 145GB. Since your limit is a lot lower it won't do much. It does have an Utility called 48BITLBA.EXE that you can run to test your BIOS with your Hard Drive and CF Card. I am not familiar with MHDD.

I have tested BOOTMAN2 with Windows XP and I assume BOOTMAN would also work.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have some DDOs for this purpose on my Website. BOOTMAN to support up to 2TiB and BOOTMAN2 to support up to 512TiB.

Some Hard drive manufacturers provided them but often for their Drives only and at least one gave DDOs a bad name by making the Hard Drive unreadable everywhere else. You are on your own with these.

Thanks for the help. First of all, can I have the link to the BOOTMAN DDO utility?

By the way, I'm using a utility called MHDD 4.6 and detected that the CF drive has zero sectors! So, something could be wrong here. :(

There is no link to the BOOTMAN DDO Package that you would need as it is not free.

There is a Demo with documentation at:

http://rloew1.no-ip.com/Programs/Bootman.htm

This Demo won't work in your Computer. It extends the BIOS limit from 137GB to 145GB. Since your limit is a lot lower it won't do much. It does have an Utility called 48BITLBA.EXE that you can run to test your BIOS with your Hard Drive and CF Card. I am not familiar with MHDD.

I have tested BOOTMAN2 with Windows XP and I assume BOOTMAN would also work.

Thanks for the help. The CF card is far from the 128 GB limit and a couple of gigabytes far from the 32 GB limit. If I insert the CF card into the CF-IDE adapter face down, the BIOS would detect the IDE hard drive as "SanDisk SDCFX-032G-(PM)" but when I try to reboot, for some reason, it garbles up the hard disk identification in the BIOS! :(

Edit: I tried the BOOTMAN demo utility and not only it's missing the BMINST.COM utility, the utility wouldn't even work from a floppy diskette drive.

Edited by ppgrainbow
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I tried the BOOTMAN demo utility and not only it's missing the BMINST.COM utility, the utility wouldn't even work from a floppy diskette drive.

If you check the README.TXT, you will see that BMINST.COM is not provided in the Demo. Only the DFMINST.COM program is provided. This allows you to create a Floppy Disk that can be used to run the Demo.

SInce your Hard Drive and CF Card are less than 137GB in size, the DDO will automatically unload and have no further affect so you will see no difference. The standard Demo only supports 48-Bit LBA Mode and passes anything else back to the BIOS.

Although I have had a few Customers for the extended BOOTMAN DDOs that you need, there never was enough interest to write an extended Demo.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I tried the BOOTMAN demo utility and not only it's missing the BMINST.COM utility, the utility wouldn't even work from a floppy diskette drive.

If you check the README.TXT, you will see that BMINST.COM is not provided in the Demo. Only the DFMINST.COM program is provided. This allows you to create a Floppy Disk that can be used to run the Demo.

SInce your Hard Drive and CF Card are less than 137GB in size, the DDO will automatically unload and have no further affect so you will see no difference. The standard Demo only supports 48-Bit LBA Mode and passes anything else back to the BIOS.

Although I have had a few Customers for the extended BOOTMAN DDOs that you need, there never was enough interest to write an extended Demo.

Thank you for telling me. I believe that there was never enough interest to write a good demo about your utility.

So, it turns out that the issue might be something other than the botched 504 MB limit. For me, I tried to insert and re-insert the 32 GB CF card into the CF-to-IDE adapter on the back of the unit. However, it turns out that the BIOS was being way too sensitive to properly operate the 32 GB CF card.

For a while, it would properly recognise the CF card on the CF-to-IDE adapter as 30,514 MB in capacity assuming that the BIOS recognised it as "SanDisk SDCFX-032G-(PM)", but the next time I hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE, the BIOS would misrecongise the CF card as "QalDisi QDAFX-030G-(PM)" again!

I'm assuming that either the Compaq TC1000 apparently has

1. Very poor BIOS support to a point where the BIOS almost always does not recognise CF cards on CF-to-IDE adapters correctly.

2. The IDE cables on the motherboard are loose.

3. It maybe possible that the motherboard is possibly going bad and unfortunately, there might not be replacement parts available. :(

I can always attempt to re-insert the CF card in the CF-to-IDE adapter to see if the BIOS is recognising the CF card correctly, but it turns out that the unit might not last forever.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hey there! I recently got a technician to install a 32 GB Compact Flash memory card

Would I have to use a dynamic drive overlay (DDO) to get the CF card in the Compaq TC1000 to recognise properly or other methods to get the CF card recognised at full capacity?

The "Maintenance and Service Guide Tablet PC TC1000" refers hard drives

40 GB 311240-001

30 GB 310668-001

The BIOS should detect the full capacity out of the box.

Most likely there is another reason. Which adapter do you use?

I would try another Compact Flash to IDE adapter.

Unkonown Compact Flash to IDE adapter example http://www.daniel-boehmer.de/thinkpad-cf/

Obviously they never read IDE specs and checked how to position the IDE pins. On electric level all pins work well but the construction is unusable just because the CF pins are on the wrong side respectively turned upside down. Imagine you pull out your ordinary IDE drive, flip it by 180° and try to push it in again. The pins will still fit into the grid of 2×22 holes but the drives case will extend the space offered. FAIL.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hey there! I recently got a technician to install a 32 GB Compact Flash memory card

Would I have to use a dynamic drive overlay (DDO) to get the CF card in the Compaq TC1000 to recognise properly or other methods to get the CF card recognised at full capacity?

The "Maintenance and Service Guide Tablet PC TC1000" refers hard drives

40 GB 311240-001

30 GB 310668-001

The BIOS should detect the full capacity out of the box.

Most likely there is another reason. Which adapter do you use?

I would try another Compact Flash to IDE adapter.

Unkonown Compact Flash to IDE adapter example http://www.daniel-boehmer.de/thinkpad-cf/

Obviously they never read IDE specs and checked how to position the IDE pins. On electric level all pins work well but the construction is unusable just because the CF pins are on the wrong side respectively turned upside down. Imagine you pull out your ordinary IDE drive, flip it by 180° and try to push it in again. The pins will still fit into the grid of 2×22 holes but the drives case will extend the space offered. FAIL.

The model numbers for the 30 GB and 40 GB hard drives were officially designed for the TC1000. No more IDE hard drives of these exact capacities have been produced as the replacements hard drives are all labeled as used.

The BIOS will be able to properly recognise hard drives (60 GB, 80 GB, 100 GB and 120 GB) and SSD compatible drives (16 GB to 128 GB) up to 128 GB due to the 28-bit LBA limit in the BIOS and the motherboard as a whole.

I tried inserting a 8 GB CF card into the CF-to-IDE adapter and for while FDISK recognised the capacity as 7,625 MB, it would still revert to 24 MB if I even try to mess with it.

For CF to IDE adapter as a whole, this is a hit-and-miss issue. Some CF cards on CF-to-IDE adapters will work on various laptops while some will have issues and not operate correctly, if not at all.

The CF-to-IDE adapter that I bought from eBay was from Hong Kong. But after reading the article, I found it seriously insulting to find that the CF pins being on the wrong side and deliberately turned upside down.

Ironically enough, I cannot tell if the 32 GB CF IDE card is being identified as either a removable or a fixed disk and it's going to be a challenging issue as the TC1000 has poor BIOS support. As a result of this, neither MS-DOS nor Microsoft Windows cannot install to removable devices and will eventually refuse to operate properly.

I'm hoping to find a workaround to fix the issue with the BIOS improperly recognising the CF card on the CF-to-IDE adapter.

Update: I found a utility called the NAND Athens ID Drive Config Word (Fixed/Removable) Change Utility Version 1.4 (or ATCFWCHG.COM). I don't know if it will work under MS-DOS or not, but I'm willing to give it a try. :)

Edited by ppgrainbow
Link to comment
Share on other sites

For a while, it would properly recognise the CF card on the CF-to-IDE adapter as 30,514 MB in capacity assuming that the BIOS recognised it as "SanDisk SDCFX-032G-(PM)", but the next time I hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE, the BIOS would misrecongise the CF card as "QalDisi QDAFX-030G-(PM)" again!

I'm assuming that either the Compaq TC1000 apparently has

1. Very poor BIOS support to a point where the BIOS almost always does not recognise CF cards on CF-to-IDE adapters correctly.

2. The IDE cables on the motherboard are loose.

3. It maybe possible that the motherboard is possibly going bad and unfortunately, there might not be replacement parts available. :(

I can always attempt to re-insert the CF card in the CF-to-IDE adapter to see if the BIOS is recognising the CF card correctly, but it turns out that the unit might not last forever.

The misrecognized CF Card Identification String indicates either a poor connection or marginal hardware.

The deviations from the correct ID are all in Bit #1.

Check your connections and reinsert the card. If this doesn't help, try a different adapter and cable.

If cdob is correct, then you don't need the BOOTMAN DDO. The 48BITLBA.EXE Program should show the correct size.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For a while, it would properly recognise the CF card on the CF-to-IDE adapter as 30,514 MB in capacity assuming that the BIOS recognised it as "SanDisk SDCFX-032G-(PM)", but the next time I hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE, the BIOS would misrecongise the CF card as "QalDisi QDAFX-030G-(PM)" again!

I'm assuming that either the Compaq TC1000 apparently has

1. Very poor BIOS support to a point where the BIOS almost always does not recognise CF cards on CF-to-IDE adapters correctly.

2. The IDE cables on the motherboard are loose.

3. It maybe possible that the motherboard is possibly going bad and unfortunately, there might not be replacement parts available. :(

I can always attempt to re-insert the CF card in the CF-to-IDE adapter to see if the BIOS is recognising the CF card correctly, but it turns out that the unit might not last forever.

The misrecognized CF Card Identification String indicates either a poor connection or marginal hardware.

The deviations from the correct ID are all in Bit #1.

Check your connections and reinsert the card. If this doesn't help, try a different adapter and cable.

If cdob is correct, then you don't need the BOOTMAN DDO. The 48BITLBA.EXE Program should show the correct size.

I knew it! I kinda had a feeling that the TC1000 either has a poor IDE connection or marginal hardware for which it adversely affects the CF card.

Out of frustration, I had to re-partition the CF card and reformat the drive again. I'm currently running SCANDISK from MS-DOS to see if has any effect on the CF card itself and if it doesn't, then I might have found the culprint of what could be wrong here.

I will leave the hard drive door open to see if it mitigates the problem temporary. I will also need to run the NAND Athens ID Drive Config Word Change Utility after MS-DOS finishes the SCANDISK session.

I kinda have a feeling that the CF card might be set to REMOVABLE by default instead of FIXED.

By the way, what do you mean by "marginal hardware" associated with the Compaq TC1000 that you might ask?

Edited by ppgrainbow
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I kinda have a feeling that the CF card might be set to REMOVABLE by default instead of FIXED.

By the way, what do you mean by "marginal hardware" associated with the Compaq TC1000 that you might ask?

There is no support for REMOVABLE IDE Drives. They are always assumed to be FIXED.

Any switch on the CF Card would be ignored.

If you want to use that CF Card as a removable drive, you need to connect it through an USB Adapter.

Marginal Hardware could be the IDE to CF Adapter Card or the interface circuitry on the Motherboard.

You need to run further tests to determine which or if it is a connectivity problem instead.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I kinda have a feeling that the CF card might be set to REMOVABLE by default instead of FIXED.

By the way, what do you mean by "marginal hardware" associated with the Compaq TC1000 that you might ask?

There is no support for REMOVABLE IDE Drives. They are always assumed to be FIXED.

Any switch on the CF Card would be ignored.

If you want to use that CF Card as a removable drive, you need to connect it through an USB Adapter.

Marginal Hardware could be the IDE to CF Adapter Card or the interface circuitry on the Motherboard.

You need to run further tests to determine which or if it is a connectivity problem instead.

Thanks for the help. It's obvious that SanDisk stopped supporting the option to treat CF cards as fixed disks.

I apologise that I didn't respond to your comment earlier. I spent the entire weekend attempting to re-install Windows XP Tablet PC Edition on the CF-to-IDE card and remarkably, it worked. :)

Here's what I did to make the CF card work on the TC1000:

1. In order for the CF card on the CF-to-IDE adapter to work properly I had to leave only one screw sealed on the right side of the hard drive door as having two screws to seal the hard drive door will mess things up.

2. I was able to re-install Windows XP Tablet PC, but not without only formatting the SD card to NTFS at 4 KB clusters to prevent data corruption. I used the botched Windows XP Professional setup found in the \I386 folder and although it reinstalled the OS successfully, it failed to install the Tablet PC drivers.

The SD card was previously formatted as FAT32 at 32 KB clusters and ran into a Unknown Hard Error trying to move around the tablet PC display. When I shut down the tablet PC computer and powered on, the unit wouldn't boot anymore and I ended up with a "Operating System Not Found" error. The end result is that when I attempted to boot from a floppy diskette on the USB floppy, several gigabytes of data on the CF card was corrupted! So, I had to start over.

3. I attempted to use the three CD-ROMs to boot the recovery disks with the USB DVD ROM drive, however it wasn't very helpful as the installer couldn't find the drives.

To work around this, I had to run the three Compaq TC1000 System Recovery ISOs through a VM under Microsoft Virtual PC 2004. I used a 10 GB virtual hard disk image as a example. The only trouble was that I had to use the host CD-ROM to restore the second disk as the recovery disks couldn't properly recognise it!

4. When it was finished, I shut down the TC1000 Recovery VM over to a ZIP file under the name TC1000.zip and in a FAT32-formatted 4,000 MB hard disk image with a date stamp of 2003-02-19. The contents of the recovery disk inside the hard disk image is not bootable and it should have at least 17,875 files in 1,415 directories with at least 9 directories on the root drive. The contents will take up at least 2.69 GB of disk space (2,866,071,172 bytes) with the \WINDOWS directory taking up almost 1 GB of disk space (1,073,242,159 bytes).

If you exclude the HIBERFIL.SYS and PAGEFILE.SYS files, the contents to setup Windows XP Tablet PC was stripped down to a bare minimum of 2.08 GB (2,237,412,996 bytes).

With TC1000.ZIP stuffed in a ZIP file, the file gets compressed to 1.35 GB (1,449,466,767 bytes)

5. The hard disk image was then mounted using IMDisk and it recognied the hard disk images as Drive I. The 32 GB Compact Flash card was recognised as drive H. In order to re-install Windows XP from the hard disk image to the CF card, I ran this command:

XXCOPY I:\ H:\ /s /k /h /e

The transfer rate of the files was slow as I placed the CF card on the PCMCIA adapter through a PCMCIA PCI slot on the back of my desktop computer and the end result is that it took a couple of hours to complete the transfer from the hard disk image to the CF card.

When it was all done, I then placed the CF card back on the CF-to-IDE adapter faced down to the IDE controller, used one screw to seal the right side of the hard drive door, turned the tablet PC back on and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition started up again!

:)

In order for the OS on the CF card to run reliably, the pagefile and hibernation features had to be turned off with System Restore disabled.

The only issues remaining is that I run into STOP errors (BSOD) when attempt to vibrate the tablet PC, as well as Event 11 errors referencing to disk, which in turn attributes to possibly either a loose or faulty IDE controller on the motherboard.

Loose or defective IDE controllers are often attributed to hard disk errors, including retired sectors on the drive development of bad sectors. The CF card on the other hand is designed for extreme environments as advertised.

Edited by ppgrainbow
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...