Question Booting from CompactFlash card via USB Card Reader

[Jayfaas]

We have a computer at work that went down. It was an Advantech ARK-1120 that had an 8GB CompactFlash drive inside running Windows XP. I was able to get the hard drive out of it and I can access it just fine through a USB card reader but for some reason when I try to boot to from it, it blue screens and reboots.

I have tried booting in safe mode as well to that PC and nothing. Any ideas on how to get into it? I want to get into device manager and see how the ports were set up for the machine it came from. Of course its one of the machines we have no documentation on 🙁

 

[Alabalcho]

Windows XP can't boot off USB. Yuu have to find exactly the same board if the original one has failed, or find other way to boot XP and run your software. Advantech should be able to get you a replacement.

And while you're into it - I hope that before you started messing with that CF card, you've made an image backup, didn't you?

 

[TerryLaze]

And while you're into it - I hope that before you started messing with that CF card, you've made an image backup, didn't you?

Yup make a backup.
But if you have access to any other halfway decent PC you can run a virtual machine and try to boot the card up in the VM due to it having very basic default hardware there is a much better possibility for it to boot.
If this doesn't work you will have to run sysprep on the disk to remove all extra drivers from the installation.
There are also cloning apps that do this for you it's called dissimilar cloning.