Shutdown corrupting windows system on CF.

[Guest]

Hi,
I am coming across a sporadic problem when I reboot a CF based XPe system.

I am running XP embedded from a CF card connected to the secondary IDE
controller, and all seems fine. However if I reboot the PC using the
"shutdown /r /f /m xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" command then approximately 1% of the
time, the system will not boot up again. When I attach a monitor to the PC,
and reboot the system I get the following message before the windows splash
screen appears: "Windows could not start because the following file is
missing or corrupt: \windows\system32\config\system"

If I try to clone the flash card using Winhex, then it encounters at least
one bad sector (chkdsk does not find this bad sector). A format of the CF
card will remove this bad sector.

I am using standard Kingston 256Mb flash cards formatted with a boot sector
and NTFS. I am not using EWF as I have data that needs to be stored over a
reboot cycle, and I have only one flash card slot (and no hard disk)
available.

Has anyone else encountered this problem, and if so do they know of a
solution? I was wondering if the /f switch on the shutdown command was
interrupting writes to the system, or if the system was shutting down before
the flash cards had had a chance to finish writing to the system.

I am investigating partitioning the flash cards into two seperate drives so
that I can use EWF (in the RAM mode) to protect the system drive, but if the
system was shutting down too fast then this would potentially make the
problem worse (as writes to the flash would be concentrated at system
shutdown).

thanks,
John Rose

 

[Tony]

John,

I posted an article approximately an hour before you where I describe I am
doing basically the exact same thing as you and getting the exact same
results (Can XPe Shutdown too fast for CF cards?). I am just as stumped as
you. Let me know if you find anything, I am quite curious as to why these
system setups are so unreliable.

Regards,

Tony