USB Boot Issue with Multiple USB Flash Drives

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Recently I have run into a USB boot problem when multiple USB Flash Drives are connected to the system. Below is the information about my target and tools. I was wondering whether the problem described below is an inherent problem with XPe.

XPe Image is created with XPe Toolkit SP2 + FP2007 + Update Rollup 1.0

Target hardware has an on-board USB flash Drive and multiple external USB ports. USB boot works fine as long as there are no external USB Mass Storage Device is connected (Attached CD-ROM creates no problem). I see the following 2 cases.

1. Target has On-Board Flash Drive installed with XPe. One external USB pen drive is connected to the target, which do not have a boot sector installed. The system starts booting, and after a couple of seconds during the windows banner is displayed the system takes a checkstop 0x7B. If the external pen drive is removed, the system boots just fine.

2. Target has On-Board Flash Drive installed with XPe. One external USB
pen drive is connected to the target, which do not have a boot sector installed. During the early boot, target reports ntldr missing message. This kind of tells me BIOS did read the boot sector of On-Board Flash Drive and found out it needs to load the NT loader. But it was not able to find the NTLDR from the same disk. This is very strange. Target boots fine if the external pen drive is removed.

I have also tried it on 2 different Intel Reference boards, Allagash and Arbuckle Mountain. Both of them gives the same error. Also tested with 2 different BIOS vendors, AMI and Insyde. Both the gives the same error.

Anybody out there seen the same problem? Any recommendations?

Regards,

Boby George
Curtiss Wright Controls, Embedded Computing
.

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