Memorex USB keys and Imageusb

[tinknockerdon]

I have had this happen on both Memorex 16GB and 32GB USB keys: Imageusb will report different sizes (29483, 29544 on 32GB) with USB keys. If I make the .bin file from the larger key (29544), I can not use it when if I duplicate more keys. They all need to report 29544, which I understand.
However, I just had an instance where .bin file was made from the smaller key (29483), but when I went to duplicate it using the larger, the software told me the destination was too small for the bin file. How can this be? This can be very frustrating when you are trying to duplicate many keys and usb keys report different sizes.
Am I doing something wrong?

[Richard (PassMark)]

The displayed size of the drive in imageUSB is the VOLUME size. When imageUSB actually goes to place an image onto the USB drive, it will determine the actual DISK size and compare that to the size of the image that is to be written.

Regardless, even if your image is bigger than the actual disk size, imageUSB should still allow you to continue to write to the USB drives. The side effect is the end of the image will not be written. This may be okay, if there is no data at the end of the image.

So if you take the image from the supposed smaller USB drive and image to the supposed larger USB drive, you should be okay.

[David (PassMark)]

We actually saw a similar thing with another (no name) brand of USB drive. We ordered a few different batches of drives, and each batch was a few bytes different in size. We never really got to the bottom bottom of the size difference.

The solution for us is to take the source image from the drive reporting the smallest size. This really has to work, if it doesn't I would suggest you are doing it wrong.\

There is also no problem putting, for example, a 2GB image on to a 16GB drive. You lose capacity, but can always reformat the drive later on.