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Any chdman experts? Help needed.

SubScorpion

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I'm out of ideas here. I'm trying to backup my Hydro Thunder hd and I can't get the chd to write to the cf card. Volume 4 is the target I'm trying to write to. I'm using a 4gb card and I keep getting the error below:
20250101_014724.jpg
I've tried doing the "clean" and "clean all" commands in diskpart and after it says the partition has zero usable bytes. As shown here:
20241229_031746~2.jpg
Here's the card I'm using.
20250101_020252.jpg
What am I missing here?
 
Try unpacking the chd to a disk image and then imaging that to the CF with HDD Raw Copy Tool.

chdman extractraw -i game.chd -o game.img

Also, what's the resulting file size of game.img? Is it 4gb?

At one point the Hydro Thunder chd unpacked to a 20gb image. I remember that creating issues for many. This was years ago though.
 
Try unpacking the chd to a disk image and then imaging that to the CF with HDD Raw Copy Tool.

chdman extractraw -i game.chd -o game.img

Also, what's the resulting file size of game.img? Is it 4gb?

At one point the Hydro Thunder chd unpacked to a 20gb image. I remember that creating issues for many. This was years ago though.
The original HD is just a bit over 3GB, the unpacked image is 3,153,024KB. So I used the method you mention above and everything copied over and when I compare the HD to the CF card, partition structure and file structure look identical but the CF wont boot the machine when I turn it on. I have the adaptor plugged directly into the ide port (eliminating the cable) and have the power to the adaptor plugged into the same power connector the HD was plugged into, the LEDs on the adaptor light up but I get absolutely nothing on the screen. Possible bios issue? I've read that it shouldn't need any changes but I don't know what else to check.
 
The older BIOS shouldn't stop it from booting. You will want to update it to take advantage of UDMA6, but maybe worry about that later.

Do you have different type of a card you can try? Maybe the card you have is fake and not a Transcend at all.
 
The older BIOS shouldn't stop it from booting. You will want to update it to take advantage of UDMA6, but maybe worry about that later.

Do you have different type of a card you can try? Maybe the card you have is fake and not a Transcend at all.
I don't have one unfortunately, got it off Amazon so who knows. I've read elsewhere the adaptor could be the issue so I have a different one on the way that was confirmed as working so we'll see how that goes. What is the update you speak of? Gonna get this up and running first but I'm curious as to what it is and what UDMA6 is. Never heard of it.
 
There's a setting you needed to change in BIOS to take advantage of the faster transfer modes available with a CF card. IIRC you need to update the BIOS to have it even available, but I could be wrong on this.

See this thread on Arcade-Museum:

https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/hydro-thunder-hdd-backup-question.302317/

It's somewhat cumbersome to do because you need to switch to a normal graphics card that can output VGA to even see the BIOS.
 
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