Could a larger hard disk bring problems?

Can you try and look at the partitions more low level? Maybe it’s hidden ?

Can you try a Linux live usb maybe?

It shouldn't be the case, windows XP was telling me that 63.5mb of 64 are used and that there's 500b of free space

Edited by I dunk for bananas 2023-01-06 10:12 PM

Then I would go with what camie said and try to clone it. I think a Linux tool may be more low level.I don’t believe just copying it is sufficient.

Maybe windows has something similar?
Make sure all cluster and partitions are the same exact format

Without looking at the device or knowing anything about the hardware. As a generalisation. If it's x86 then it probably has a BIOS, which means it quite likely has a boot sector. Which means you need to give it a boot sector for the BIOS's disk controller's embedded ROM to hand off to the boot loader to decompress nk.bin.

Thus, much the the same reason you cannot copy a C:\ to another driver using file explorer, you cannot copy the internal storage of nk.bin to a replacement via file explorer. Which may be the case on many SoC's which simply issue a DIR on a FAT partition and look for a specific file name; bu is not typical on x86 which looks for the first byte in the first sector on the first drive to be the pre-amble to the boot loader.
UEFI is different however and more akin to traditional Windows CE SoC's!

I tried cloning the .img of the original CF to the new one and it writes without error, but Windows then tells me that the drive is unformatted. Hmm..

I tried marking it as active using diskpart, but it doesn't show up when i use "list disk". It does show up when I put "list volume"
Trying to mark it as active using diskmgmt.msc doesn't work either, the option is just greyed out

Edited by I dunk for bananas 2023-01-06 11:02 PM

I assume your device doesn’t have an official firmware / rom download available?
If not, I wonder if you could use an hp thin client usb flash utility but with your nk.bin. Idk if it’ll work like that but maybe worth a try ?

Still I’d do more research and look into what camie mentioned

What are you using to clone it?

I was using win32diskimager

Yeah, I'd try something else, more robust and not Windows based. You have to boot to it, but something like CloneZilla.

I tried it again with HxD and it actually boots from the card now! The next challenge is going to be to figure out how to make it use the entire drive--right now it's just using 64mb out of 4gb, but diskmgmt indicates all 4gb as being used. What could I do perhaps?

The clone tool has to re-initialise and rewrite the partition geometry.

Do you know how to do that? I'm a bit lost using this tool, there doesn't seem to be much online help in regards to cloning a disk with it

I've found a tool that lets me change the disk geometry (cylinders/heads/sectors/sector size) manually, but I have no clue how to approach this sadly

Find a setting in the clone tool that will resize the destination to fit the available geometry. During the copy, not after the event.