Fast & Furious CF update

RalphT3

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Has anybody upgraded their hard drive to Compact Flash yet on any F&F series of games? I am debating on replacing them as they fail or a couple here and there. If you have, what did you use? I don't want to buy a 32GB card if it only needs an 8GB card. I know the Hard Drives are 40 GB and the recovery disc is under a gig. I haven't investigated what the uncompressed usage on the HD is yet, hence not wanting to buy a CF too big or too small.
 
From my experience with Drift it should be as simple as:
  • Replace HDD with a big enough CF card in an IDE adaptor
  • Restore machine using factory restore CDs

It literally does not care where it's running from as long as XP Embedded was installed correctly (hence the restore CDs) and it can find the parport dongle.
 
What size CF card would be safe to go with if it doesn't use the whole 40 GB HD. I know Drift uses 2 CD's(or DVD's, haven't looked yet).
 
They're CDs. Compressed though. Theoretically it should fit on a 4GB fine, but I don't know if there's partition table issues.

Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried it. I know the game doesn't check the HDD for anything but the restore process may be expecting a drive of a certain size.
 
OK, made a trip to Micro Center and grabbed a cheap IDE to CF adapter by Syba for $11.99 and a 32GB compact flash card by Kingston for $90(ouch, I know I could get them cheaper online but I'm tired of my boss on my back about it) and a refurb 40GB HD for $15 if the CF didn't work. After all, this is just a test, I'll order the main stuff online and save money (50% probably).
So I hooked it all up and everything loaded onto the CF in normal speed, let it go through its first boot stuff, registrations and what not and set all the settings and everything is working great again. The total boot time from power on to being able to credit it up went from 40 seconds down to 30 seconds. No real big time saving there but, NO MORE HARD DRIVE!!
I might pull the card out later and see how much of the card is used and go smaller next time.
Why don't the manufacturers just use them to begin with and just add that measly $100 to the price and save the repair guy that amount in down time and tracking down old technology a couple years down the road? [/rant]
Thanks guys for the info and hopefully this will help other owners down the road!
 
Why don't the manufacturers just use them to begin with and just add that measly $100 to the price and save the repair guy that amount in down time and tracking down old technology a couple years down the road? [/rant]

You know why. Cost reduction vs. out-of-warranty useful life... oh wait, out-of-warranty useful life is bad for business! Cost reduction it is!
 
OK, made a trip to Micro Center and grabbed a cheap IDE to CF adapter by Syba for $11.99 and a 32GB compact flash card by Kingston for $90(ouch, I know I could get them cheaper online but I'm tired of my boss on my back about it) and a refurb 40GB HD for $15 if the CF didn't work. After all, this is just a test, I'll order the main stuff online and save money (50% probably).
So I hooked it all up and everything loaded onto the CF in normal speed, let it go through its first boot stuff, registrations and what not and set all the settings and everything is working great again. The total boot time from power on to being able to credit it up went from 40 seconds down to 30 seconds. No real big time saving there but, NO MORE HARD DRIVE!!
I might pull the card out later and see how much of the card is used and go smaller next time.
Why don't the manufacturers just use them to begin with and just add that measly $100 to the price and save the repair guy that amount in down time and tracking down old technology a couple years down the road? [/rant]
Thanks guys for the info and hopefully this will help other owners down the road!

bumping an old thread, but whats the minimum sized cf card that will fully install f&f?
 
I would discourage you from using CF for this purpose. CF tolerates a much lower number of writes than SSDs, and you would be better off using a small SSD and SATA-PATA adapter. If the install has a Page File, I would expect you will kill the SSD
 
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