Hello.

We have been using a stable WinCE 4.20 platform for about 4 years in our
product, and we're seeing a problem which we can only attribute to using a
new line of hard drives.

In the past, we have used our Image on a wide collection of hard disks:
various pen drives, CompactFlash drives, rotary drives - of all brands. Last
week, we attempted to use this same image on a Transcend 256 MB Solid State
disk ( http://ec.transcendusa.com/product/ItemDetail.asp?ItemID=TS256MDOM44H
) It doesn't work! After the Image loader has finished its progress, the
screen goes black - and we receive no debug messages from WinCE, and nothing
else happens.

We have used the aforementioned image on the 32 and 64 MB versions of the
Transcend disks with absolutely no problems.

We tried rebuilding a smaller image for testing purposes, and it works "a
little" better, this image boots to the desktop, and after a short while
"hangs" - no adverse debug messages are seen.

We are currently investigating further, but we're wondering if anyone has
seen anything like this with the particular drive, or any other drive.

Grateful for any ideas

-P

Re: WinCE 4.20 not supporting all hard drives? by Luca

Luca
Tue Mar 25 00:10:49 PDT 2008

are you using hive based registry? If not, if the disk is not 'seen' by the
OS the
ATAPI driver should simply fail to load without hanging the system.
It could be problem related to DMA: check if the smaller disks reports DMA
capabilities or not

--

Luca Calligaris
www.eurotech.it

"Popoi" <Popoi@discussions.microsoft.com> ha scritto nel messaggio
news:66C93FF7-D471-4F94-8AEE-DDF0AB137022@microsoft.com...
> Hello.
>
> We have been using a stable WinCE 4.20 platform for about 4 years in our
> product, and we're seeing a problem which we can only attribute to using a
> new line of hard drives.
>
> In the past, we have used our Image on a wide collection of hard disks:
> various pen drives, CompactFlash drives, rotary drives - of all brands.
> Last
> week, we attempted to use this same image on a Transcend 256 MB Solid
> State
> disk (
> http://ec.transcendusa.com/product/ItemDetail.asp?ItemID=TS256MDOM44H
> ) It doesn't work! After the Image loader has finished its progress, the
> screen goes black - and we receive no debug messages from WinCE, and
> nothing
> else happens.
>
> We have used the aforementioned image on the 32 and 64 MB versions of the
> Transcend disks with absolutely no problems.
>
> We tried rebuilding a smaller image for testing purposes, and it works "a
> little" better, this image boots to the desktop, and after a short while
> "hangs" - no adverse debug messages are seen.
>
> We are currently investigating further, but we're wondering if anyone has
> seen anything like this with the particular drive, or any other drive.
>
> Grateful for any ideas
>
> -P



Re: WinCE 4.20 not supporting all hard drives? by Popoi

Popoi
Tue Mar 25 09:25:01 PDT 2008


Luca.

Thanks for your reply.

The 256 MB module supports up to UDMA Mode 4, PIO Mode 6 according to their
datasheet. The 64 MB module does not claim to support DMA, and PIO mode 2.

Could you explain why this would have a bearing on why i'm seeing this
problem?

Thanks

- P



Re: WinCE 4.20 not supporting all hard drives? by Popoi

Popoi
Tue Mar 25 15:02:01 PDT 2008


Further notes:

The DMA was the right path. I was able, although it was not obvious, to
build an image that supposedly disables DMA for the IDE device.

following this post:
http://www.tutorials-win.com/Platbuilder/Hive-based-47098/

I tried in vain to find where the "settings" registry entry was defined, but
I came up with nothing. all i know is that bit 3 controls whether DMA is
enabled or not. Any more insight into this would be greatly appreciated.

- P

Re: WinCE 4.20 not supporting all hard drives? by Luca

Luca
Wed Mar 26 00:12:58 PDT 2008

Hi: the "settings" bitmask are defined in
%_WINCEROOT%\public\common\oak\drivers\block\atapi\atamain.h:

#define ATA_SETTINGS_HDDMA 0x1 // Hard disk DMA enabled
#define ATA_SETTINGS_HDINT 0x2 // Hard disk interrupt enabled
#define ATA_SETTINGS_CDDMA 0x4 // CD-ROM/DVD DMA enabled
#define ATA_SETTINGS_CDINT 0x8 // CD-ROM/DVD interrupt enabled

so bit 0 (not bit 3) controls if DMA is enabled for a hard disk

--

Luca Calligaris
www.eurotech.it

"Popoi" <Popoi@discussions.microsoft.com> ha scritto nel messaggio
news:2C2A7A95-E6EC-464F-B465-E296873049FF@microsoft.com...
>
> Further notes:
>
> The DMA was the right path. I was able, although it was not obvious, to
> build an image that supposedly disables DMA for the IDE device.
>
> following this post:
> http://www.tutorials-win.com/Platbuilder/Hive-based-47098/
>
> I tried in vain to find where the "settings" registry entry was defined,
> but
> I came up with nothing. all i know is that bit 3 controls whether DMA is
> enabled or not. Any more insight into this would be greatly appreciated.
>
> - P



Re: WinCE 4.20 not supporting all hard drives? by Popoi

Popoi
Wed Mar 26 09:03:21 PDT 2008


This helped tremendously. Thanks Luca.