making duplicate images of CF installs

QNX USERS QNX6 - OS
1

Hi there,
First of all let me say I’m an absolute noob when it comes to QNX, but I do have a fair amount of experience with Linux. So what I’m trying to achieve here is to make an exact duplicate of a 256MB ComplactFlash image of a QNX install that runs on a PC104 x86 board. We have a laptop computer running QNX 6.3.0 that we use as a temporary workstation for QNX. So I tried taking the card and plugging it into this laptop (but not mounting) on a USB card reader (we bought one that is compatible with QNX) and used dd to make a disk file image of the CF card, like this:

dd if=/dev/hd1t79 of=myimage.img

Then we took that original card out, and plugged in the new card. Again, without mounting the card, we used dd again to transfer the copy back to the new CF:

dd if=myimage.img of=/dev/hd1t79

When I stick it back into the PC104 board, it shows up to the point when it asks for the boot partition. Then it prints the message “Missing operating system” and stalls.

Both cards are exactly the same size, although not the same brand.

Any help to this noob would be appreciated :slight_smile:

Cheers,
-J-

2

J,

It’s been my experience from doing this (I was using Ghost under windows and doing an image copy) that you can’t do image copies between different brands of CF even if they are the same size. That’s because each brand seems to have a slightly different geometry so that no 2 brands have the exact same number of bytes of storage (even if both brands claim 256 Meg).

But we were able to successfully make and copy images if we used the same brand.

Tim

3

I have had this problem in the past.
I now always use a script to build the disk from scratch.
If you create a directory with the files you need on your disk, it’s quite trivial to write a script that formats the disk and then copies over the contents.

4

To bren-uk,

Will you post a copy of the scrip you use to build your bootable CF?

Thank you,
bkelly

5

Yes please, bren-uk, I would really appreciate that as well :slight_smile:

Thanks!