On Wednesday, 10 June 2020 15:25:03 BST PeterMerchant wrote:
> I have been trying to duplicate a 16GB MicroSD card to another and it
> hasn't worked. The original was a TDK 16GB card, which I copied to my
> computer with DD.
>
> I then tried to use DD to copy it to the Toshiba card, with an error message
> [now lost].
>
> So I tried to use etcher and it tells me that the image is too large for the
> destination card.
>
> What has happened? Do I need to add some parameters when backing up the
> disk?
Peter,
This is an old problem with SD Cards. Manufacturers sell these devices with a
nominal capacity of 8 GB, 16 GB, etc, but in reality they are not all the
same. So if you originally ran dd to save an image of a card that had a
capacity of 15.91 GB and then try to copy it to a card that has a capacity of
15.9 GB, it will fail. (Even if the partition is not full, dd will faithfully
copy all the empty sectors.)
There are ways of shrinking the size of the image, but that involves some
magic with GParted, some remounting of the image in loopback mode plus some
mind-bending arithmetic. I've never had any success with that.
Nowadays I try to avoid the problem by shrinking the original partition a bit
before I dd it to create the image; you should be able to do it with GParted.
Then, when I copy it to the new card, the image should fit.
Of course if the disc is full...
--
Terry Coles
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