Ins and outs of SD cards and CF cards

Dog's dinner

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If like me you've never thought about or even knowingly touched an SD card or CF card and haven't a clue what they do, read on.

I forked out £35 for an SD card intending to install barry allen on it to enable multibooting or multi-images. I had posted a question wondering whether it was a good idea. Problem is with posts, if you ask more than one question per post, you probably won't get an answer to more than the first - and often you'll get an answer to a question you didn't know you'd asked.

So it was - after waiting a day and a half for an answer, I opened the plastic container and inserted the SD card into the Dreambox slot.

A couple of hours later (following various unsuccessful attempts to install barry allen on the card, an answer appeared saying 'you can't use an SD card for barry allen. You need a CF card'. That particular SD card ended up in my daughter's new camera.

More head-scratching. Off to a local branch of Clas Ohlsson where I got hold of a Sandisk CF card (might add that the shop assistants didn't know what a CF card was either) for about £12 - 4GB of space.

Back home I jammed it into the CF card slot. The dreambox was on, but I didn't know any better. Since the dreambox didn't seem to react or ask whether I wanted to format the card, I started turning the machine on and off at the mains, removing and inserting the card in between every other boot cycle.

By then I'd discovered (five days too late) that one shouldn't insert or remove CF cards while the Dreambox is on. That explained something. But had I even shoved the card into the Dreambox right way round? Obviously the end with the holes in it had to point inwards, but should the Sandisk sticker uppermost, or underneath? Anybody's guess I suppose. At the moment its nestling inside its slot with the Sandisk sticker underneath.

I expect by now though that I've buggered up the whole machine.

I went ahead yesterday and starting deleting anything reminiscent of barry allen in the Dreambox's own flash. That's probably buggered everything up as well. It's certainly deleted everything on the hard drive (only a week's worth of concerts and films etc. - last time it was about twelve months' worth).



Back to resetting the machine to the factory
 

Topper

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Well DD it is certainly is an expensive way to learn, but the rule of thumb is RTFM, but oh yes Dreamboxes don't have one or do they?, well at least you are making progress, certainly a useful post for anyone else thinking of multibooting or multi-imaging
 

Lazarus

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But at least the Forum system worked ................ not all questions can result in an answer, as nobody currently active might have that answer, so one "self-helps" and feeds back the outcome.

Poacher turned gamekeeper.

Now you are the expert and will no doubt be on hand to answer related queries any time. day or night!

Sorry you have had all these tribulations - you've helped me cast aside any latent desire to get a Linux Receiver :)
 

Dog's dinner

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Thanks to Topper and Tivù for replying. The dreambox people have indeed published a manual, but since the first couple of days of ownership, it hasn't really helped, apart from actually installing a hard drive and plugging it in. Most of the instructions, which seem at first glance pretty logical and comprehensive, seem on closer inspection to have been written for another device entirely, not the dm8000. The translater also gives the impression of either not speaking German or not speaking English, or both. I know I'm supposed to be grateful for small mercies, but after the first few mercies, there are no more to be had from that quarter, certainly nothing in the league of the problems I've been having over the past year.

As to being an expert, I've never felt more like an arch idiot. My greatest problem is finding understandable literature for non-Linux speakers. But what's out there is either garbled and incomprehensible, or written for the initiated and incomprehensible. Having said that, I've been toying with an idea about writing up (or down) my life with a Dreambox, from the word go, to the word stop. Funny thing is, all the other myriad devices in my house work a treat (Oppo bluray player, Onkyo multichannel receiver, three computers, nice Panasonic plasma). Only the dreambox manages to throw up such a constant, never-ending stream of problems. Whether it's the software, hardware, me or the combination of all three, I don't know.
 

oldfart

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yep - on a DM8000 - treat a CF card as a hard disk - which you have found out!
 
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