CF card

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Download

Cfcard 64.png Go to the CF card images section on the download page.

Write images to CF cards using Windows

Tested with Windows XP 32bit and Windows 7 64bit

Download the latest stable binary of dd-for-windows (this was 0.6beta3 when last updating this pacge). Unzip the package. Rename dd.exe to dd-removable.exe. This will prevent dd from messing up anything else than removable drives. Start a command prompt with Administrator rights (use Ctrl+Shift+Enter when executing cmd) and go to the directory you unzip dd-for-windows to.

Invoke dd-removable.exe --list to get a list of removable drives.

dd-removable --list output

My CF card is visible as \\?\Device\Harddisk3\Partition0. I know this from the fact that if I remove the CF card from the USB card reader and invoke the --list command again the entry is gone. Another indication is the size is 1048190976 bytes which fits my 1GB CF card.

To write the dd-image from above you download the image, use 7zip to uncompress the gzipped image and then invoke

dd-removable.exe bs=16M if=image.dd of=\\?\Device\Harddisk3\Partition0 --progress

Post install

When getting a new CF card with an installed Robotino OS or after writing an OS image to a CF card

  • After power on Robotino the first time it might switch off automatically. This is due to a filesystem check. Simply power on again and everything works fine.
  • From Robotinos Display select Network->WLan->Search AP. If an Allnet-AP is found (the AP in all newer Robotinos) then /etc/robotino/ALLNET_AP is written and WLan channel and SSID are shown correctly in the startup screen.

Set the fixed bit on consumer CF cards

Most consumer CF cards are detected as removable media and not as harddisk, i.e. you can not boot from these cards. For SanDisk cards there is a tool to set the fixed bit on the CF cards so that they are detected as harddisks (this only works for SanDisk cards with Firmware Version HDX < 5.00).

  1. Get a USB stick
  2. Use UNetbootin to install FreeDOS to the USB stick
  3. Download SanDisks ATCFWCHG.com from the internet
  4. Copy ATCFWCHG.com to the USB stick
  5. Tell Robotinos BIOS to boot from USB stick
  6. Execute ATCFWCHG.COM /S /F

Where to buy CF cards