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

Customer just brought me the Sandisk from their DX-80, and the card seems totally fried. I have an identical sandisk they could use, but it is of course blank. Is there a special script or master image I can run to make the card bootable to the DX-80? Their card had 8.5.11b software, which I don't have the image for. I believe the VM software resides on the C: drive of the card but there is another partition, D:, that stores the boot loader (at least that was the case with Debut).

You can find it on the CCC website.

RBF, are you sure it's on the CCC? I seem to remember having this conversation (or reading it) in a previous thread, only to find that what was on the CCC was nothing more than the upgrade, to get from 8.5.108 to 8.5.11B.

Tech support told me that Verticle comdial does not support loading a new flash because some pc's have issues formating and booting the drive. He would not say you couldn't do it, just that they are not allowed to support or discuss ways of doing it. I have not been successful with it, but I only tried once.
Mark

I've done it a couple times, but only on CF cards that came with the voicemail board. I've never tried on other cards.

I thought there was an article about using norton ghost to do an image transfer to another cf card. I did use an old pc and a cf to ide adapter to copy the files from the original flash to a 1 gig flash card, so I know it's doable.

I think that worked from an old win 98 machine, had something to do with the boot record, or something like that. There just doesn't seem to be a cut and dry "this will work" arrangement to make a new flash card from a store bought sandisk, at least if there is, I haven't found it. And it needs to work on the new machines we use, not an old door stop.

Mark, had you tried that utility I had sent you? It's worked for me, after I blanked an existing CF. But like I said, I've not yet tried a store-bought CF. It might make a difference if it's CFII, instead of CF.

I tried it on a new sandisk 512 CF with no luck, that was my only attempt.
Mark

I have done it - the CF must be formatted to a standard FAT file system. And the utility available on CCC will install all the files in the right places. The customer I done this with was F32 software release.

Bill

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.

How large of a CF did you try, nolegalmember? What worked, what didn't?

I had it going up to 128MB...beyond that DOS doesn't seem to like the massive cluser size (32K for a disk this size on FAT). It shouldn't have anything to do with brand or write speed....as long as its CF. For the future, Comdial will definately need to move the Corporate Office DX software off of the dos platform! Thank 5years for the image by the way, it worked great!

I guess I have to find a copy of this Norton Ghost and give it a try.

I did some more testing today and got the usb compact flash reader to make a working 512M. I still have a little more testing to do, but will share my results when completed.

:toast:

Here are the results of my testing. All testing was done on a Dell Dimension XPS B1000 computer, using the embedded usb (UHCI based), an add-on opti 1.1 controller (OHCI) and nec usb 2.0 (EHCI) controller. The compact flash reader was a Sandisk model # SDDR-92 and the following cf models were used: Sandisk 64M (SDCFB-64-201-00), Sandisk 128M (SDCFB-128), Sandisk 256M (SDCFB-256-201-00), Toshiba 512M (THNCF512MPG), Toshiba 1G (THNCF1G02PG). The software used was Norton Ghost 2003 (sightly modified) and the Datalight Rom-Dos 6.22 from the installed VM CF. The modifications were 1, the dos version and 2, using the motto hairu mass storage device driver DI1000dd.sys. As stated earlier I couldn't get the 512M to work using the Ghost included Iomega guest.exe driver.

Using the DI1000dd.sys driver gave 2 choices for disk layout. I was able to make workable units for the 3 Sandisks by choosing the first offered configuration, while both Toshibas required the second. While I didn't have any larger Sandisk models to do an apples to apples comparison, I feel that if one choice doesn't work, the other should.

To conclude my testing I ran a dos based HDTEST.EXE utility on the 64M and 1G cards to verify read/write operation. If you have any questions PM me.

John

Sorry guys, been real busy and missed this post.

I have not read all the post in here but I have done what you are asking.

I used a program called HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. You should be able to google it and get it.

This will format your flash as a bootable flash (you will need a ms-dos disk to read from for this) for you and I just copied the files off of a good working DX-80 flash vm.

I took a 128 meg DX-80 flash card and moved the files to a 1 gig flash. It seem to work fine. I did not leave it in my demo to see if issues came up later. I was just seeing if it could be done in an emergency basis.(and the record time was increased to thousands of minutes)