imageUSB Error "Destination Drive is Smaller Than The Image File"

[beevo]

I continually get this message when trying to write to some USB sticks. The USB sticks are 250mb, the image is 113mb.



Sometimes the drives will program, most times not. Originally this worked with out issues, suddenly started to be a problem. Not sure why this is an issue when the .bin file is half the size of the empty USB drive.

The USB drives are new blank devices. I have tried Zeroing the drives and Formatting using the program to no avail.

Bill

[Richard (PassMark)]

In Windows Explorer, if you right click on the .bin file and View Properties, what is the file size?

[beevo]

251 MB (263,848,448 bytes) for the BIN file.

The source files that were used are 138 MB (144,740,545 bytes)

Bill

[Richard (PassMark)]

While your source files may not fill up the drive and you have free space remaining, when creating an image with ImageUSB of your USB Flash Drive, it will preserve all UNUSED and slack space during the cloning process.

[beevo]

Okay...

So what do I do now?

Bill

[Richard (PassMark)]

Depending on how full the drive is and how fragmented the data is, you may be able to get a way with writing the larger image on to the smaller drive. Or if only the contents of the drive is what you are after (and not exact duplicate is needed), you can use File Explorer, and just copy and paste the contents to the drive.

[beevo]

Copy and paste of hundreds of these will be a RPITA....

I tried partitioning the drive, but the program creates an image based onteh total size of the drive.

The source drive is just under half full.

Thoughts?

Bill

[David (PassMark)]

The whole purpose of ImageUSB was to create an exact copy of a USB drive. So it copies everything, including slack space, unpartitioned space, boot sectors, master file tables. Everything.

So if you are just trying to copy a number of ordinary files between ordinary USB drives, then maybe you are using the wrong method?

Otherwise you need to start with a source drive that is identical or smaller in size than the destination drive. Sometimes this is hard to do as, for example, not all 64GB flash drives are in fact exactly 64GB.

[beevo]

The USB drives I am using are identical, we bought a box of 1000, all the same size, type etc.

[David (PassMark)]

Maybe they aren't in fact identical.

Can you find your original source drive (the one you made the.bin file from) and the destination drive that is failing and compare the total drive size in bytes.

Another easy solution is to just purchase 1 small drive and use that as the source drive. Only needs to be 1 byte smaller or same size as destination.