USB Ram Stick

[Oliver Fromme]

Julian Stacey <jhs at berklix.org> wrote:
 >   On FreeBSD-6.0-RELEASE I took a friend's 2G stick containing the
 >   usual MBR with one partition allocated as aprox.  2 Gig of DOS
 >   file system, & read the entire raw stick onto hard disc.
 > 
 >   (I still have that image BTW, 2138177536 Apr  3 01:40 sony-stick-da0 ,
 >    but I dont care about the data, I care about the expensive stick!)
 >   
 >   I wrote the image back to my identical stick (with dd), it wouldn't continue
 >   writing after a while, (cant remember exact message).

The exact message would be very useful to know.

Are you absolutely sure that your stick is really identical,
including the size?  The sizes sometimes seem to differ by
small amounts, even between sticks of the exact same brand
and model.

For example, a shop here recently sold 1GB sticks for 25 EUR
so a friend of mine bought two of them.  I tried them both:
one had 2096640 blocks, the other had 2096768 blocks.

I'm not an expert, but my guess is that the manufacturer
tests the chips and excludes bad areas, so the capacities
vary.

Maybe your image was a little too big for the second stick.

 >   Now /dev/da0* is just da0 , no other entries.
 >   
 >   I've tried creating a new MBR with fdisk, but failed.

Did you try to clean it before?  i.e.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 count=100
(See the example in the bsdlabel(8) manpage.)

 >   camcontrol format da0 -w
 >     You are about to REMOVE ALL DATA from the following device:
 >     pass0: <USB USB 2.0 Fash 1.00> Removable Direct Access SCSI-2 device 
 >     pass0: Serial Number 
 >     pass0: 1.000MB/s transfers 
 >     Are you SURE you want to do this? (yes/no) 
 >     Formatting...Format Complete

I assume that didn't do anything at all.

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
Dienstleistungen mit Schwerpunkt FreeBSD: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd
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