CF disk slices?

Chuck Swiger cswiger at mac.com
Sun Mar 19 12:26:37 UTC 2006


Harlan Stenn wrote:
> Can one put multiple slices on a CF disk?

Sure.  Most BIOSes will treat a CF flash much like they would a USB device, and
they'll be happy to see a MBR.

> I ran fdisk on one machine
> and was able to carve up a CF disk with 4 slices (I want to boot one of
> 4 different OSes on a soekris system).  There are other systems that
> seem to indicate that a CF disk can only have 1 slice on it.

Hmm.  You are perhaps not aware that flash memory can only do a relatively
limited number of writes before failing (10K to perhaps 50K, if you've got a
fancy CF card with write leveling and/or spare sectors)...?

Installing and updating multiple operating systems is contraindicated on such
hardware not because it is not possible to do, but because the CF won't last
very long under such a usage profile.

You should configure a CF-based system to operate with the filesystems mounted
read-only most of the time, or at least turn off updating atime information.

-- 
-Chuck


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