On Feb 16, 2008 10:05 AM, Chris Bagnall <lists at minotaur dot cc> wrote:
> > Did you ever manage to solve this problem? I am having extreme problems with
> > Vista and physdiskwrite and Vista.
>
> No, in the end I just fired up my old XP laptop and used that.
>
> I've done a little more testing today, and it doesn't work on either my desktop (Vista Business
x64 w/ USB card reader), nor my laptop (Vista Business x86 w/ PCMCIA card reader).
>
> I've tried a multitude of CF cards ranging from 128MB up to 2GB, none of which seem to write.
>
> Referring back to my original post, although physdiskwrite claims to have written 16384 bytes, the
access light on the CF reader never kicks in at all, which makes me wonder whether it's ever even
started writing to the card.
>

That's exactly what I saw, but just once.  Well, I tried like 3 diff
CF cards and a couple diff m0n0wall images and a pfSense image and
none would work, all bombing out after 16384. But I unplugged and
replugged my CF writer and it started working again, and have never
seen it happen again.

Both my Vista machines, laptop and desktop are Vista Enterprise x32. I
was originally running Vista x64 on my desktop, back in November 2006
the day Vista went RTM to enterprise licensing customers.
physdiskwrite even worked fine on x64 at that point, though I blew
away that install and went with x32 because so many other things
didn't work on x64 at that time.

Chris, when you reinstall or replace one of those machines, could you
try with just a bare Vista install with no customizations and no apps
and see what happens? I'm curious if it'll work then, and eventually
break as you install apps and/or change OS settings. That might help
narrow it down. It's strange that some people can't get it to work at
all on multiple machines, while the majority have never seen an issue.

-Chris