VOGONS


First post, by britain4

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I’ve got a Toshiba Libretto U100 laptop I’m trying to spruce up a bit, essentially I’ve fitted a SanDisk Extreme 64GB CF card into it with a 50 pin adapter. The machine recognises it fine with the exception that XP only wants to format it to 32GB although sees the full 64GB when formatted externally in a Windows 10 machine.

Regardless of whether the card is formatted externally or in the Libretto, XP recognises the CF card C drive as being removable and also the swap file isn’t functioning, which I suspect are linked. The system occasionally gives the error "Windows created a temporary paging file…" on boot.

Does anyone know if the two above issues could be linked and if so how to mark the CF card as a fixed drive? If not, anyone have any suggestions on the swap file issue?

Thanks!

- P-MMX 200MHZ, PCChips M598LMR, Voodoo
- P-MMX 233MHz, FIC PA2013, S3 ViRGE + Voodoo
- PII 400MHz, MSI MS6119, ATI Rage Pro Turbo + Voodoo2 SLI
- PIII 1400MHz, ECS P6IPAT, Voodoo5 5500
- Toshiba Libretto 110CT, 300MHz, 96MB RAM

Reply 1 of 4, by Horun

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Formatted on a Win10 machine did that because technically a CF is removable media but added the Win10 crap to it. WinXP defaults to a max 32GB C: drive if you do FAT32 (only other choice is NTFS off the XP cd AFAIK).
You could use a third party boot disk (Hirens??) and do a full 64Gb FAT32 partition and format then install XP to it....

added: best if you wipe the CF on same Win10 machine before trying anything else or you might get an access violation 🤣 (has happened a few times ;p) when trying something else to re-Fdisk+format

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 2 of 4, by Jo22

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I think the same, Win XP does not allow to Format as FAT32 on a medium that has 32GB capacity and beyond.
However, it can use such medium perfectly fine if it was pre-formatted that way (just think of external USB HDDs).

britain4 wrote on 2021-05-21, 21:30:

Does anyone know if the two above issues could be linked and if so how to mark the CF card as a fixed drive? If not, anyone have any suggestions on the swap file issue?

Thanks!

Many, many years ago there was a DOS utility (leaked?) for SanDisk cards that could flip that bit on the CF..
However, it was meant for SanDisk cards only and likely doesn't work with current cards.

To my understanding, "Fixed" cards are only available for embedded or industrial markets.
Normally consumers cards are all "removable".

Anyway, that's no issue per se.
It's just a single bit that the CF cards remembers.
The card itself does not care about that bit at all.
It's Windows NT itself which makes a bit fuss about the card being fixed/removable.

Back in the early 2000s, the Car PC enthusiasts discovered a way to make use of some files from XP Embedded.

The EWF filter and a modified INF is all it needs to get XP on any removable CF.

https://flylib.com/books/en/3.234.1.73/1/

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Reply 3 of 4, by britain4

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Thanks for the replies folks. The card is recognised as a 32GB disk regardless of whether it’s NTFS or FAT32 - when the card is formatted on Windows 10 the XP setup reports it’s a 64GB NTFS partition on a 32GB drive (?) but installs and runs fine regardless.

This is with the exception of the page file issue which is my main problem, I would have little issue with the above if it wasn’t for the (related?) page file issues it’s having. It has the maximum allowed 1GB of RAM at the moment so I would think it might be needed at some stage.

- P-MMX 200MHZ, PCChips M598LMR, Voodoo
- P-MMX 233MHz, FIC PA2013, S3 ViRGE + Voodoo
- PII 400MHz, MSI MS6119, ATI Rage Pro Turbo + Voodoo2 SLI
- PIII 1400MHz, ECS P6IPAT, Voodoo5 5500
- Toshiba Libretto 110CT, 300MHz, 96MB RAM

Reply 4 of 4, by britain4

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Finally got this up and running now - thanks to everyone who replied. Fairly easy solution in the end using the filter driver - got it working using a combination of the above link and the following: https://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?topic=2332.0

Ctrl+Alt+Del also bypasses the stuck “Welcome” screen if you’re ever in the same boat

Thanks all!

- P-MMX 200MHZ, PCChips M598LMR, Voodoo
- P-MMX 233MHz, FIC PA2013, S3 ViRGE + Voodoo
- PII 400MHz, MSI MS6119, ATI Rage Pro Turbo + Voodoo2 SLI
- PIII 1400MHz, ECS P6IPAT, Voodoo5 5500
- Toshiba Libretto 110CT, 300MHz, 96MB RAM