feipoa wrote:The only disadvantage is that if you have a large CF or SD card, say 64 GB and want to make a clone of it, but the card only has an 8 GB partition with, say 2 GB worth of data, your image size saved will still be 64 GB. It can fill your hard drives very quickly. So I recommend using the smallest CF/SD cards for your retro systems for cloning purposes. The disadvantage of that is that usually the smaller CF/SD cards don't have the better cards for use as a hard drive. This would be A1/A2 specification for SD cards. For CF cards, the smallest UDMA 7 card with 160 MB/s speed I could find was 32 GB (SanDisk Extreme PRO).
Well, I have two CF cards in my retro system:
A very old 2GB SanDisk (15MB/S!!!) CF as drive C:\ (has Win98SE on it)
And a very recent UDMA 7 128GB (SanDisk Extreme 120MB/S) as drive D:\ for DOS games and Win98 games. This drive has been formatted to 128GB (no extra, smaller partitions), but it only contains about 30GB worth of games.
Recently, Win98SE reported that it has detected some long-file name corrupted files on the 128GB CF- some ScummVM games that I recently copied onto it), therefore the DOS portion of the Scandisk relegated its task to the its Windows version (had to run Scandisk within Windows that is), and after a long, excruciating *repair* process (mostly had to baby-sit the entire process and choose "ignore bad blocks" option) it finished the process.
Well, I kind of feel that this drive has become *dirty*, therefore I want to backup/clone its contents to another CF Card, format it, and then restore back.
PIII-800E | Abit BH-6 | GeForce FX 5200 | 64MB SD-RAM PC100 | AWE64 Gold | Sound Canvas 55 MKII | SoftMPU | 16GBGB Transcend CF as C:\ and 64GB Transcend CF D:\ (Games) | OS: MS-DOS 7.1-Win98SE-WinME-Win2K Pro (multi-OS menu Using System Commander 2K)