I've got a wierd problem that maybe someone here may have run into. Windows related but tied to embedded file systems.
We've got a third party file system on large USB hard drives and small CompactFlash with our embedded system. We've got a Windows driver for the file system which we can use for convenience. We have not been putting any partition tables or MBR on the large hard drives (this wasn't planned, but we're stuck with a lot of these in the field).
Windows will see the small CompactFlash drives just fine and use the third-party file system, with or without an MBR. But the large hard drives it refuses to recognize, and treats it like unformatted disks (some disks will even crash XP). My theory is that there is a Windows feature that large hard drives have to have an MBR, whereas small drives use a legacy support (ala floppies).
The questions are: is this theory right? Is it mandatory to have an MBR, even on drives that don't need to be booted via BIOS? Is there any workaround to try and tie these disks to a third party driver in Windows, or is this a completely hopeless cause?
-- Darin Johnson