Fun Ghosting the CF card

I am heading off on a conference soon, so I thought it was about time I had a go at Ghosting up the 512MB CF card. Using Barts Network boot disk, I made a ghost of the drive. This all went well, with no errors reported. As a safe guard, I also modified my 'config backup' script so it used scp instead of rsync. After backing up all the config files to my main server, I then uploaded them to the subversion repository for safe keeping.

I then placed the CF card in my Kodak CD4800 camera, formatted it and took a few snap shots, and uploaded them to my main computer.

Time to see if I can re-ghost the CF card with the FreeBSD image. Nope - it refused to ghost back, saying that the "Destination drive too small" How can this be, as it's in the exact same config. that I ghosted the image up in the first place!

After a bit of googling, I ended up at the Symantec's knowledge base. I came accross this article that mentions using this: ghost -OR -FIS Hey, it worked! well kind of. The progress bar got too 99%, and an 'inconsistant' error popped up. Upon rebooting, I got a blank screen, just a blinking cursor.

After pondering this for a night, I thought it might be time to try playing with fdisk. I have never used this util directly. Turns out there is a nice interactive wizard mode, and hey, it was giving me resonable defaults... and it worked. I had my image back up and running - cool!

I then re-ghosted the CF card this time as a partition, and then back down the the CF card again. This time with no errors. This is the second time I have had problems ghosting an entire FreeBSD drive, or more to the point, ghosting an image back. It's nice to have 'fix' for this problem.

More to the point I can now easily use the CF card in the Mark I, or in my camera. I can store over 1000 photo's on the CF card :-)