CloneDisc

What happens if the destination ‘disc’ is smaller than the source ‘disc’?

I have tried this twice where disc = SD card: The first time both SD cards were 8GB cards, although CloneDisc said that the destination disc was smaller than the source disc (but not by much); and the second time the source SD card was 8GB and the destination SD card was 4GB. On both occasions a warning was given about the possibilty of the resulting clone being unreadable. The first case has resulted in a working SD card with no apparent problems; but in the second case I may have messed up the SD card.

In both cases the source was a partitioned 8GB SD card with bootloaders and RISC OS ROM in the FAT32FS partition and ‘HardDisc4’ in the SDFS partition. All the 8GB SD cards, sources and clones, work with my Pandaboard, but the 4GB ‘clone’ does not (doesn’t even get to a prompt).

I can read the 4GB card in a card reader, but with “Target error – Medium error” messages from filer. On the iconbar, “Free” gives the same entries as the 8GB card: Free = 7GB, Used = 689MB and Size = 7GB. I can only console myself with what Keith Dunlop once said: “I am always breaking things”. But, I don’t suppose he would have tried something so stupid. :-((

Short of reformatting the 4GB SD card, using it as a destination disc with another working (unpartitioned) 4GB as source card should work? This would be simpler for me than a reformat as CloneDisc is so simple to use. Of course, the result will only have the bootloader and ROM stuff on it.

What happens if the destination ‘disc’ is smaller than the source ‘disc’?

Things Go Wrong™.

If you’re going to clone a disc, the destination disc has to be able to store everything that was on the source disc, including as-yet-unused space. If not, at some stage something will want to access the missing part. Surprise, surprise, it will fail. Even the replication process will fail for the same reason.

Given two discs like that, the best solution is to start from the smallest; that way you will be able to replicate it to all the rest.

Clearly that doesn’t help you where you are now. Your only chance, as far as I can see, is to replicate the files on one disc to the properly formatted other disc, which might well be a long process.

I am not bothered about the files on the SD card as I have duplicates elsewhere. I just want to get it back to a functioning SD card. My suggestion in previous post of using CloneDisc doesn’t work as I get “Target error – Medium error”. Trying to format it with !FAT32Form or with Fat32Format produces “File ‘fat32format’ not found”.

It looks like a vital executable part of the formatters is missing. Check your installation of same.

I guess the Fat32Format binary should be in !Boot.Library. The !Fat32Form application I have on my Iyonix is just a wimp front end and doesn’t itself contain the binary. I will check the BB later when it is up and running .

My Pandaboard no longer boots from the 8GB clone (of an 8GB source) although it has done every time before. One thing that’s new, so it is no longer a true clone of the original, is that I have saved a Disc Image of a 4GB SD card to it. Could that be the cause?

@Chris Johnson
I have the module, FAT32FS, in !Boot.Choices.Boot.PreDesk.fat32fs the latter including a !Run file, if that is relevant.

My Pandaboard no longer boots from the 8GB clone (of an 8GB source) although it has done every time before. One thing that’s new, so it is no longer a true clone of the original, is that I have saved a Disc Image of a 4GB SD card to it. Could that be the cause?

If that’s the only thing you’ve changed, and the time it stopped working correlates exactly with the time of the change, you have to assume it’s the cause.

Though I can’t immediately think of any reason for failure inherent in putting a 4 GB image onto an 8 GB card. It’s more likely to be associated with the way you cloned it.

I assume your 4 GB card is an SDHC, not an SD? Though even then, nothing in the data you stored to the card should be dependent on whether it’s SD or SDHC.

(There are arguments as to whether 4 GB SD cards really exist. According to the SD Card Association, anything over 2 GiB must be SDHC, but there were a very few 4 GB cards that claimed to be SD. Internally, SD cards are byte addressed, SDHC are block addressed, but that should be transparent to the user. It’s still possible to address 4 GiB by the byte addressing mechanism of SD. I suspect cards over 2 GiB were disowned because some programmers screwed something up by trying to use signed integers when they should have used unsigned, and therefore the cards became problematic.)

I didn’t have Fat32Format in !Boot.Library, now I do.
Tried to format the 4GB SDHC class 6 card again and this time !FAT32Form reported in a task window that “Format complete
Operation finished. You can now close this window”
However, the card seems no different than before. :-(
I have just noticed that the initial report in the task window says, after the first line of “Raw media size: 3839 MB – 7862272 sectors”,
“Available size: 39 MB – 79872 sectors”.
This is the size of the original FAT partition holding the boot loaders and RISC OS. So it looks as if it is just formatting this 39MB partition. No wonder it does it so quickly.
I was assuming that it should FAT format the whole of the SDHC card. It is the ‘RISC OS’ partition that seems unchanged and screwed up. Can I reformat just this SCSI:0 partition with the ‘HardDisc4’ stuff on it?

Trying to boot with the 8GB SDHC class 10 card gets as far as the text
“RISC OS 1024MB
CORTEX-A9 Processor”,
but then follows with the line
“Error: File ‘WindowManager: Templates’ not found (Error number &D6)”

Follow up to my problem with the 8GB SDHC class 10 card.
I deleted the 4GB file, a disc image, from the card, but this made no difference. I then replaced the riscos ‘ROM’ (v5.21 12/8/13) with v5.21 of 22/09/13. Now Pandaboard booted correctly. Why should this make a difference, since the previous riscos version had worked many times before getting the error (see last post).
Can anyone say what that error means, as it occurred before !Boot?