Greenhorn Question - Copying to Hard Drive

[RedBarchetta]

Hi

I'm a total tenderfoot to this process.

I'd like to copy the disc image of a CF card. I am concerned when the HDD Raw Copy Tool 1.10 Free tells me that All Data on the Target will be Irreversibly Overwritten.

What is the process if I want to copy this CF card onto my hard drive and use the image to recopy onto other CF cards?

Thanks

[dick]

Hi! It is good you ask this question now rather later when it would be too late.

You need make an image file of your cf card. So you would select copy to a file and give the file a name lile 'target' or 'my cf card'.

If in doubt you could try/test it out on a spare pc or laptop beforehand.

[HaQue]

ways to image can be visualised like this:

Source CF-->Target CF (target data will be overwritten)
Source CF-->Image File on storage media(NOT the Target), then Image file-->Target CF (will be just another file on the storage Media, and will overwrite the target).

One other thing to check is that all CF Cards of the same size(in GB), are not the same exact size. It is conceivable that a good quality 64GB card, when you take an image, will not fit on another 64GB Card. Better off doing something like creating a 55GB partition, and imaging that. I had many issues with installing Voyage Linux on small SBC's when playing with outdoor WiFi stations. I kept buying cards and just assumed that this one just "didn't work" ad this one "did work" when in actual fact the actual number of bytes on the card were the issue. The listed capacity is an estimation, bad blocks and file systems will use some of them.

A good live CD is clonezilla.
have your CF card in the PC, boot clonezilla, then image to a USB stick. the wizard should be obvious enough or post back and we can help.

One great tip is to not even have any disks you want to make sure is not overwritten connected to the system.

You can get an IDE to CF adapter. Unplug all disks except adapterized(TM!) CF card and DVD drive. Boot to clonezilla and when asked put in a blank flash drive. Then you cannot kill any other drives no matter what goes wrong, apart from a very dumb mistake overwriting the source, but clonezilla does ask you if you are sure..twice

[RedBarchetta]

Thanks for the help. I take it then that if I copied a disk image from a 512 MB CF card, that it would not be copyable to a smaller CF card.

Would I have trouble copying to a larger CF card, should I run into problems if the cards not being the exact same true size.

[HaQue]

Probably depends on the imaging program, but a smaller to larger should be ok.

If you had a 64GB card, with a 25GB partition, you could conceivably take an image of the partition and write it to a 32GB card.

You might want to look at whether imaging partitions instead of the whole disk works better. Doesn't hurt to play around with it a bit and you will soon get more familiar with disks/images/partition etc

[RedBarchetta]

Thanks. Will do as soon as I get some more cards.

[digitalferret]

Hi RedBarchetta
good that you didn't *Rush* into this job *Moving Pictures* over </cough>

concur with HaQue:
disconnect every other drive except the source and destination.
smaller to larger is good. (different sizes will help confirm source from destination on whatever s/w you use)

preferrable to have blanked the destination prior.

confirm Source drive from Dest drive.
on pain iof death, don't confuse the two.

gl

K

[RedBarchetta]

Hi

A belated thanks. Everything is running along Force 10!

[HaQue]

Great well done