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Home / Other I-Appliances / MSN Companion New 1A-1 Can not make a CF bootable!

New 1A-1 Can not make a CF bootable! (modified 0 times) jack08180 Profile Hello all. I bought a 1A-1 and have been working on trying to hack the thing. I have gotten into the bios without problem and made the adjustments. My problem is booting the CF card. I have a 16 and a 48 meg (sandisk and lexar respectively). I have been using ranish/partioner to set the active partition in an attempt to make a win98 boot disk (figure once I get to a dos prompt, rest is easy). My problem is that every site that I am looking at (www.ia1hacking.com) makes it sound so easy, then talks about dollying an eltoro linux image on it. I am not interested in any of that. I want to make a bootable cf card that I can lay a 98 image on. (I have a 48 meg win 98 drive image, and have some experience with other small os's and think I can contribute to this effort once I get past this). When I use ranish, it shows 3 things, first, the MBR, second, an unused partion on 15k, then the full partition that is set as "bootable" But it doesn't boot!! LOL. I have used a sandisk SDDR-31 usb reader under 2k and a pcmcia adapter under ME. Closest I have gotten is a drive read error, which usually means that it is seeing the hd, but the command.com isn't loaded. Any suggestions here? Thanks for the input, and I will post my ideas soon as I get to try them 02-03-2004 18:18:40

RE:New 1A-1 Can not make a CF bootable! (modified 0 times) jack08180 Profile I spent last night reading a little more and found out that the sandisk sddr-31 has attitude. I bought a 6in1 dazzel which is a rebranded zio. On the ME machine, didn't seem to make much difference. I did put another partition on the cf card and formatted it as "boot manager" and set it bootable. When I did that, I got "OS missing". Same setup, set the fat16 partition bootable with a win95 boot disk on it, got "Error!!" on the screen. Every help thing I read says I should be doing this in win98. I am reading the card fine, pcmcia adapter in the ME machine seems to be best. Is gettting a 98 machine really going to help me? 02-05-2004 02:38:09

RE:New 1A-1 Can not make a CF bootable! FIXXED!!!!! (modified 0 times) jack08180 Profile Assuming anyone cares, I got my cf to boot. I also think I found out what I did wrong. I used a memorex cf reader from office depot and a sandisk 128 meg card. In ranish, if you are on the fat 16 partition, you can press enter and adjust the sector that the partition is on and the HD number that dolly uses. Every time I would reboot, the fat 16 partition would turn red and say "invalid sector information". I used the steps on here http://iahack.tripod.com/ BUT the very last thing that you do BEFORE you put sys.exe on the card, is go back into Ranish and highlight the fat 16 partition and go down low and put the hd # as 129. It kept putting mine as 128, which my main HD was also 128, so there was a conflict. You can also press f6 and it gives you a bootloader "helper" I think it overwrites the MBR. Dunno if that helped or not, but I am convinced that making sure the CF is HD 129 did the trick. Working on a sub 128 win98 image right now. Hope this helps other people that might be having problems 02-10-2004 21:22:15

RE:New 1A-1 Can not make a CF bootable! (modified 0 times) jack08180 Profile I did FINALLY get the thing to go. I think that I have put all the pieces of the HD # together. When you have a cf in a 98 machine, it sets it as hd129 as default, being the secondary. The LAST thing that you do before you take it out is change it. If you run sys, it will change it back. So run sys, then go BACK into ranish and set the # to 128, then pull the card. When you put the card in the ia-1, it might detect it as C, it might detect it as D. If you put it in and it doesn't work, change to boot order to D first. Bet it will work. What I did was make a 98 boot disk with FDISK and part on a 16 meg CF card. So the CF is the primary. Get it to boot, the fdisk and format the internal flash memory. Then I copied all of those files to the internal memory and TAKE THE CF OUT. This will reset the internal flash as the primary. Format or do whatever you need to do to it. When you reboot, it should go to a dos prompt of the internal memory if you did it right. THEN I put my 512 cf in it and formatted it. Then you can go in and reverse the drives and make the CF 128 and the internal 129 so it will boot off the cf instead. Hope that helps, I bet this will clear up a LOT of these glitches. 02-20-2004 20:29:02

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