Using USB?
Some customers have reported some strange issues when using their USB memory sticks or drives on Feature Pack 2007. One customer in the forum wrestled with the question of why the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon would not appear in his system tray when inserting a USB Flash disk. He had both the supporting components required to enable this feature, namely "Safely Remove Hardware Program" and "Tray Icon Add/Remove Support". (FYI- for more information on programmatically removing a USB drive safely see this article).
1. Another customer reported that their USB Memory Sticks behave inconsistently on different hardware. On certain hardware, if they insert a USB memory stick it works fine but on other hardware, using the exact same XP Embedded configuration and build, the memory stick does not show up in Explorer until after a reboot. It is accessible through a command prompt, though. Another reboot is required to get the USB stick to disappear again from Explorer after it has been removed.
The reason for these behaviors is that we shipped a whole new USB stack in Feature Pack in order to support the new feature "USB Boot". In this feature the USB drive is marked as a fixed drive so that it is bootable. Including any of the USB boot components (USB Boot 2.0 and USB Boot Mass Storage Device Update) in your configuration will mark an attached USB drive as fixed. If you are using a memory stick just as storage then be sure to double check to make sure you have excluded the USB Boot components from your configuration to prevent such behaviors as described above!.
- Lynda
Technorati tags - Componentization, XPe
