FYI, here's more info about the DFEC and the CompactFlash.

Currenly the DFEA crates have 512MB cards while the other crates use
128MB cards.

The card *must* be formatted as MSDOS FAT16.  Cluster size doesn't
matter and will scale with the card size up to a limit (>1GB?).  It's
important to verify that it's FAT16 as the DFEC won't know what to do
with a FAT32 or NTFS file system.

There is some evidence to suggest that larger cluster sizes 16kB,
32kB, 64KB, etc. result in faster downloads and initialization times.

Long filenames are not supported, so make sure that the CompactFlash
card doesn't have any hidden "Recycle Bin" or anything like that on it
before removing it from the laptop.

The FAT16 spec recommends that the file allocation table to be
duplicated twice at the beginning of the partition.  The DFEC only
updates the first table, which may result in Windows thinking the card
is corrupted. This seems to vary with the windows versions.
Reformatting the card in windows will make two tables and the DFEC
will safely ignore the 2nd table.

The DFEC should be powered down whenever the CompactFlash card is
removed or installed.

Note that the CompactFlash connector key mechanism has been modified
-- the card can go in upside down.  Always line up the arrow marker on
the DFEC front panel when installing a card.

If the CompactFlash card is FULL the DFEC will hang... it will not
even return a BUSY status and none of the GUIs or macros will work.
So when downloading new files to the card always make sure that there
is enough available space!

**********************************************************************

If one suspects that the filesystem is corrupted there are two
options:

1) Insert the card in a PC and save all the files to the hard
   drive.  Reformat the card FAT16 and copy the files back.  Check the
   file sizes as a basic sanity check.  DFEA files should be about
   1.5MB each.  This way the files on the card stay synced with the
   DFEWare database and (hopefully) most files will not need
   redownloading.  Run checksum macros on all files to be sure they
   are not corrupted.  If a file is corrupted, delete it and
   re-download.

or 

2) Reformat the card FAT16 and re-download everything.  Before
   re-downloading the files they will need to be removed from the
   DFEWare database, either by running lots of delete macros (which of
   course give warnings about files not found) or by hacking the
   DFEWare database text files directly.  Yurii may be able to provide
   a quick guide to doing the latter.




To format a CompactFlash card is must be removed from the DFEC and
inserted into a PC (notebook with PCMCIA adapter or USB adapter, etc.)

As with most things, formatting the Compactflash card is more
straightforward under Linux and the user has more control over the
process.  In this example I'm using USB reader which is detected under
/dev/sda.

To format the card just plug it into the reader and issue the command:

$ /sbin/mkdosfs -F 16 -f 2 -r 512 -s 32 -v /dev/sda1

This formats the CompactFlash card properly and doesn't add any extra
windows junk (hidden files, recycle bin, etc.) on there. 

JTO 23 Nov 2005