Asked By Mik
03-Jul-07 10:36 AM

Hi Sean,
This motherboard has a single IDE channel (single IDE connector) so it can
handle at most 2 IDE devices at once. The CF is installed in an IDE2CF
adapter, (which would normally be connected as the master on the primary
(i.e. only) IDE channel). There is no SATA connector.
In your article (referenced below), you mention that the best platform to
run TAP from is XP Professional. That made real sense to me, so I connected
a blank 80 GB hard drive and a CD-ROM drive to the motherboard.
When I attempt to boot the XP setup CD, I get a "Trap 00000006
===EXCEPTION===" message, with a short register dump. I'm not sure what to
make of that.
Next I augmented my USB boot with every file system I could find, and I
tried running XP setup from XPe booted from USB. That seemed to work, so I
attempted to install Windows on the hard drive. Setup copies a bunch of
files to the hard drive, does some initialization, then reboots. Setup says
to remove any floppy from the A drive before the reboot. I wasn't sure
whether to take that literally, since there is no floppy adapter on this
board.
If I leave the USB memory stick plugged in, the boot.ini file directs the
boot to "XP Professional Setup", instead of "XP Embedded", as you might
expect. However, setup basically starts over at the beginning, asking me
what disk partition to install Windows on. I go through the motions... it
copies files, reboots, and I'm back where I started (i.e. an infinite loop).
If it remove the USB memory stick, I get the following message:
problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and
disk hardware. Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk
configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information."
Another Catch-22. I'm guessing that that last error message occurs because
the USB memory stick is "C:" when XPe is booted, then the hard disk becomes
HP has a utility that is supposed to make a USB memory stick look like a
floppy disk. I'll try that next and see if I can get XP setup to cooperate
better.
-Mike