atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems VoiceMail Systems and Programming Flash Card Boot

Bill, Does the size of the card matter? and how do you do a standard FAT file system format with a XP machine.
Mark

Mark,
When you run the format program, the second drop-down box (labeled "File System") will allow you to select either FAT, NTFS or FAT32. Select FAT.
It has been over a year since I done this for my customer, but I inserted the CF into my reader and examined the "Properties" and went and bought a CF of the same size, which was 64MB.

Bill

I did some testing today, using both and internal cf to ide adapter and an usb cf adapter and norton ghost. My finding were that the usb adapter always tried to write to the cf using logical block adressing and failed to make a bootable duplicate. Using the cf to ide and forcing the pc bios to normal chs I could reliably create a clone on another card. The tests involved using the 128MB Sandisk cf out of a new system and transferring to a store bought PNY 512MB. I got the cf to ide adapter off of ebay, and paid $12 for 3 delivered.

Bill & John,
Two good approaches to the problem that should help depending on the situation. Thanks for the input. I don't know what - "Using the cf to ide and forcing the pc bios to normal chs" means, So I'll try Bill's approach or change out the whole thing, as I have been doing when required. But I'm sure that info will spur some of the wizards here to figure it out.
Mark

I'm surprised BD3c hasn't chimed in on this one yet. He must not have tried doing this yet. It's bound to come up sometime, I would expect. Of course, I think CF are more reliable, long-term, than are hard drives, other than the fact that they are more easily corruptable. Still, no moving parts. A corrupted CF may still be better than a dead HDD.

I wish I had a DX-80 available to "play" with - I would recreate the scenario and provide the step-by-step procedures. As I said, this was over a year ago and I may be missing some minor detail. The reason I tried it was because I had contacted Comdial tech support about a VM problem. Their solution raised some concern and I wanted a copy of the existing flash card "just in case". So I copied the flash card onto a directory on my hard drive. I then made the changes tech support requested. In the process I became curious if an off-the-shelf flash card would work, so I purchased one, used the utility from CCC and, sure enough, the VM booted from the CF and worked like a champ.

Now that I am having to think about this in more detail, some thoughts are beginning to surface out of the cobwebs (unless you are as old as me you won't understand that statement!) - don't forget that the DOS directory will have to be copied onto the CF. I can't remember if the utility from CCC creates the DOS directory.

Bill

Bill,
I could send you a DX80 to play with but I don't have a VM card I can spare. It would be perfect to have some real proven documentation.
Mark

I've tried using ghost to copy a voicemail flash card in the past, and it seemed to work fine. I used a USB card reader and standard store bought compact flash card. Tried up to 512M and it worked ok (this was on the VMII, the newest version).

It could also make a difference what VM board you have. There are 2 versions that can use a flash card or hard drive, the VM and the VM II (B and C respectively). I know if you put hard drives on them, the "b" version can't go over 20G, but the "c" version has no problem with 40G drives.

The FAT file system included with Windows NT 5 and later (windows 2000 and later) is not the same as the FAT file system used with IBM PC DOS. Its scaled down and simplified. This system should not be used with DX-80 or Debut...these require the true good old DOS FAT system. In fact, I tried for myself to format a CF with FAT with XP, and the DX-80 unit would err out on mounting the file system. The image Comdial provides does write out the correct file system...but as you try larger and larger CF cards, DOS starts having problems with the increased cluster sizes. Also bear in mind that FAT file system only goes up to 2 GB max.