Subject: Re: List of supported CF-cards in terms of booting (2.0-RELEASE)
To: None <port-hpcarm@netbsd.org>
From: Hernani Marques Madeira <hernani@vecirex.net>
List: port-hpcarm
Date: 02/21/2005 16:39:41
On Mon, Feb 21, 2005 at 08:09:04AM -0700, Herb Peyerl wrote:

> Unfortunately, it's not quite this simple.
> 
> My employer ships a PC based rackmount box that boots off CF.  We were  
> standardized on Sandisk 128MB cards but had trouble with some cards  
> causing the PC to fail to boot.  The same thing with 256MB and 512MB  
> cards. The cards worked fine in our cameras and so forth.  After some  
> diagnosis, we discovered that the actual flash devices inside were made  
> by different vendors (Toshiba vs some other name I couldn't remember).   
> We switched to Kingston and our problems went away; for a while... We  
> still have the occasional CF card that a PC won't boot from, but the  
> incident of occurence is far smaller with Kingston than it was with  
> Sandisk.

Hmm, ok. So it may be possible that between cards with a unique label and model
there are differing "internals".

> We also tried various brands of motherboard and BIOS and the problem is  
> not unique to a specific platform.
> 
> Apparently the level of standardization in the CF industry is a little  
> poor.

Well, if it cannot be guaranteed to work I'll have to mark the list there
explicitely as being "without any warranty".

Thanks for this information.

-- 
hernani