Ten
Wed Jul 28 15:03:26 CDT 2004
Not so. The TFAT lives on the CF itself. You should be able to do
something like this. Note this assumes a single partitioned store using all
avaiable space for the file system. You can do this for multiply
partitioned drives but you'll have to walk the partition table and it gets a
little more complicated (but not much!).
1. Take a fresh CF card and format it with TFAT.
2. Take the TFAT CF card and insert it into a CF reader attached to a PC.
Make sure the PC is not XP because XP will try to format the card FAT32. I
suggest 2k or NT. 98 may also work.
3. use HexWorkshop 4.2 to Open the drive.
4. Save the first 2000 or so sectors from the CF to disk. If you research
the TFAT file system you may be able to save much less than this to get the
partition and allocation tables. For example, on my 1 GB CF, I can clone a
FAT file system to another card with as few as 300 sectors.
5. Remove the CF
6. Insert another blank CF into the CF reader.
7. Use Hex Workshop to "Restore Sectors" to the new CF.
8. Test the card in a CE device.
If this works, you can do it programatically with Win32 calls.
The downside to this is each CF is a clone of the others my guess is this is
probably not a problem. If it is, a little knowledge about the TFAT
structure and a short console app and/or VB script can put a new volume
string into the sector dump file before you restore it to the next CF card.
Nick.
"Nac McFeegle" <Nospam@nowhere.com> wrote in message
news:%238ZnnhHdEHA.720@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...
>
> "Andrew Worsley" <Andrew.Worsley@nospam.4.me> wrote in message
> news:MPG.1b71e90acee9763d9896b0@msnews.microsoft.com...
> > Hello,
> >
> > We have two CompactFlash interfaces in our design - one internal to the
> > box (that will have a storage card permanently in it), and the other
> > external (that will sometimes have a storage card (using ATADISK) but
> > will also support IO cards of various types.
> >
> > My question is this. Is it possible to configure this system such that
> > the internal CompactFlash uses TFAT, but the external CompactFlash uses
> > "normal" FAT?
> > Ideally, I'd rather use TFAT in both instances, but I understand there
> > are interoperability issues with TFAT and desktop windows OSes. Hence
> > I'd prefer to stick with FAT for the external slot, since our users will
> > be regularly transferring data to PCs via cards inserted in that slot.
> >
> > Is there a way to massage the registry settings to allow this?
>
> No problem; if you add TFAT to the platform, the decision as to what is
> FAT/TFAT is made by the driver according to how the media is formated;
just
> format the internal card as TFAT and the external on as FAT.
>
> This is what we're doing with a similar device; the only pain is
production
> formating the internal cards, which can only be done in a CE device not a
> PC!
>
>