Create an image of a CF card

[dvdborn]

I'm looking for a way to create & restore image files from EIII formatted CF cards

The last couple of days I had some problems with my CF card adapter in my EIII.
When things went wrong I had to reformat a 1GB CF card. And this would take more than 2 hours each time.

Being able to write an image file to a CF card would speed things up significantly.

I was playing with the dd command in OS X but I'm unable to mount an EIII formatted CF card. Hence dd wouldn't recognize the /dev.

I don't care if it's a Windows or Mac solution. I'm guessing that there are programs out there that can do this. Though I couldn't find any searching the web.

[kdk]

Chicken Systems Translator perhaps? It can make and read disk images in various sampler formats.

[mg73]

Either you can use Translator
which is supporting EIII quite nice now.
Now you can translate AKAI to EIII with just "minor" bugs
but it´s getting there.


EMXP can´t format EIII format yet
but you can backup your working EIII image and then
use that image to restore any other unformatted CF card(needs to be the same size or bigger than the image.

[esynthesist]

In fact the option in EMXP to create a new (blank) EIII HD Image, and then restore this image to a (windows/mac formatted) CF card is more or less the same as formatting the CF card in the EIII, because it's the same as a logical formatting process for the EIII (=initializing the EIII file system and file access table on the CF card)
The only thing EMXP is not doing is performing a physical low level format of the CF card. On many devices and computers this is not required at all, but based on experience, the EIII and Emax-2 samplers require their own physical formating procedure if the CF card is smaller than twice the size of the HD image that you want to restore to that CF card (with EMXP or another tool).

So... if you have a normal Windows/Apple formatted CF card of 2GB, and you generate and restore an 810 MB EIII HD image to that card without formatting it first on the EIII, it should work.

But again, this is based on experience only. So I can't guarantee it for now. At some point of time in the future I will further investigate this and try to add support for true physical formatting in EMXP too.

Some more important remarks:
- currently EMXP can only save operating systems to HD Images (or directly to CF cards) for Emax and Emax-II samplers. This is not supported yet for EIII samplers, so a new blank generated HD Image would not be bootable once it's restored to a CF card.
- EMXP can however create a "backup" of an existing CF card, e.g. one that you have initially formatted on the EIII itself. This backup image contains also the operating system, so if you restore this image to other CF cards, they should be bootable.
- EMXP can - of course - also directly access CF cards to add/remove/replace individual sound banks on them. The same can be done on the HD images too.
  

[dvdborn]

Hi Esyntesist,

Thanks for the info. I'm going to try it right away.

[dvdborn]

It worked! I was able to create an image file from 2 CF cards (64MB & 1GB).

At first I was unable to restore the 1GB image to another 1GB CF card. Not enough space according to EMXP. The CF card I used to restore was from a different manufacturer.

However, I was able to write the 64MB image onto this 1GB CF card.
The EIII booted from it and I was able to load & save banks.

Big thanks again for having created EMXP!