OESF Portables Forum

Model Specific Forums => Sharp Zaurus => Zaurus - pdaXrom => Topic started by: doublec on January 02, 2004, 06:07:56 pm

Title: SD card corruption
Post by: doublec on January 02, 2004, 06:07:56 pm
Since installing the X11 ROM I\'ve been having a problem with SD card corruption. The following is how i can reproduce it consistently and I\'m wondering if anyone else can confirm if it happens to them. It\'s a 512MB SD card.

It seems to happen if more than one process reads/writes to the card at the same time. For example I have a largish gzipped tar file on the SD drive (I used gnugo-3.4.tar.gz from the GNU site). From a Zaurus terminal I copy the tar file onto the SD drive. Then untar it:

  tar -zxvf gnugo-3.4.tar.gz

After a while this fails with input/output errors and the SD card is not accessible. I have to reboot, unmount the card and fsck the card to get it usable again.

If I copy the tar file into the home directory (ie. not on the SD card), change to the SD card and do the untar then things work fine:

  tar-zxvf /home/root/gnugo-3.4.tar.gz

I\'ve also had the problem occur when sftping files from one machine to the SD card on the Zaurus while using applications installed on the Zaruus. But the above scenario does it all the time.

Has anyone else experienced anything similar? Anything I can look at to help track down the problem?

Chris.
Title: SD card corruption
Post by: offroadgeek on January 02, 2004, 06:29:10 pm
I\'ve flashed my 760 with different roms a few times in the last couple days, which means I re-format and use the SD differently with each rom (I don\'t know exactly why I do all this)... but anyway... I keep all my files, backgrounds, ebooks, etc. on my SD and I have a copy mirrored on my 1gb cf card (just in case).  After each re-flash back to the x11 rom, I always do a recursive copy of this \"documents\" directory from the CF directly to the 256mb SD card, and haven\'t had a problem yet.  The directory is just over 20mb.  

The only time I\'ve had troubles with my SD card and the x11rom is when the battery was low (~5%) and I couldn\'t seem to access the card.  That was fixed after I plugged her in and did a quick reboot.

don\'t think this helps, but it\'s my story (and I\'m sticking to it  )
Title: SD card corruption
Post by: doublec on January 02, 2004, 06:45:25 pm
That sort of thing works in my case too. It seems to mostly occur if the file or data I\'m copying from is also on the SD card and I\'m copying to another location on the SD card. Or some other program is reading/writing to the card while I do the copy.
Title: SD card corruption
Post by: offroadgeek on January 02, 2004, 07:05:32 pm
hmm... let me try that and see what happens
Title: SD card corruption
Post by: offroadgeek on January 02, 2004, 07:49:33 pm
this time I created a test directory on the sd (/mnt/card/test/), did a recursive copy from /mnt/card/Documents/ to /mnt/card/test.  This is the 20mb directory.  While that was copying, I was browsing the SD via gui (rox filer?).  I also opened a text file (from the SD card) in scite, edited and saved the file.  no troubles with any of this.  I did a du -sk . of both directories and they had the same contents.

btw... mine is a SanDisk 256mb card.
Title: SD card corruption
Post by: doublec on January 02, 2004, 09:08:48 pm
Thanks for trying it out. Maybe it\'s a bad SD card or something.

Chris.
Title: SD card corruption
Post by: pgas2 on January 03, 2004, 02:08:30 am
I\'ve experienced the same problem with a 256MB Ultra II San Disk SD card.
If you check with mount, you see that the card for some reason became mounted read only. This happens  to me while compiling, untaring, taring
etc rather randomly.

Generally remounting rw allowed me to continue.

Unfortunately my SD card seems to be dead now :-(. So I can\'t do any furtther testing....
Title: SD card corruption
Post by: Anonymous on January 03, 2004, 12:34:54 pm
I have had the same problem with my SD card (SanDisk 256MB) and the X11 rom of 24th of December. The SD card became read-only after installing some ipk\'s from the card or saving a document on the card. The problem cannot be reproduced with the X11 rom from the 12th of December. The problem may be related with the new USB features in the latest rom.
Title: SD card corruption
Post by: ScottYelich on January 03, 2004, 04:26:41 pm
yes, this is the same behaviour that I see with my 512mb sd.

it\'s basically useless to try to use sd with zaurus (with it like this).

Scott
Title: SD card corruption
Post by: doublec on January 03, 2004, 06:11:12 pm
So it may not be just me. Thanks for the feedback. When it happens I usually unmount the card, eject it, reinsert it, fsck.ext2 /dev/mmcda1 and then remount it and continue.
Title: SD card corruption
Post by: sweinst on January 03, 2004, 09:22:41 pm
Hi,

I have also a problem with my SD card. I had to reformat it with the FAT file system. Now, I\'m unable to mount it on my zaurus but the card is perfectly read on a Pocket PC.
What is the file system to use with a SD card? It\'s the first time I\'ve formatted it, before I used the card as bought (I think it was a FAT file system?)...
What is the command to use on the Zaurus for formatting the card?