On Feb 21, 2005, at 7:53 AM, Hernani Marques Madeira wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 20, 2005 at 06:10:57PM +0100, Hernani Marques Madeira  
> wrote:
>> If you can confirm more cards booting up under this circumstances, so
>> please write them to mailinglist. You can, of course, also expand the  
>> above
>> list (wiki) directly.
>
> Ok, I added both cards posted to this with a link to where this has  
> been
> confirmed:
> http://wiki.bsd-crew.de/index.php/NetBSD-hpcarm- 
> Installation#Liste_von_CF- 
> Karten.2C_die_zum_Booten_unterst.FCtzt_werden_.282.0-RELEASE.29
>

Unfortunately, it's not quite this simple.

My employer ships a PC based rackmount box that boots off CF.  We were  
standardized on Sandisk 128MB cards but had trouble with some cards  
causing the PC to fail to boot.  The same thing with 256MB and 512MB  
cards. The cards worked fine in our cameras and so forth.  After some  
diagnosis, we discovered that the actual flash devices inside were made  
by different vendors (Toshiba vs some other name I couldn't remember).   
We switched to Kingston and our problems went away; for a while... We  
still have the occasional CF card that a PC won't boot from, but the  
incident of occurence is far smaller with Kingston than it was with  
Sandisk.

We also tried various brands of motherboard and BIOS and the problem is  
not unique to a specific platform.

Apparently the level of standardization in the CF industry is a little  
poor.