SD card-strangeness

[Anonymous]

Hello,

My SanDisk 256 SD card no longer works...after fdisk-ing it to ext2fs, it worked fine for a while, but one day the Zaurus stopped mounting it. I can see the card from both the Zaurus File Transfer program and the File Manager app, but the only entry is \'NotAvailable\'. When I try to delete this entry via Konsole, an error message says, \"unable to remove: Read-only file system\".  It also won\'t mount, giving an \"Invalid argument\" error message. Opie-Formatter doesn\'t see it either. When using the card reader (SanDisk 8-in-1) on WinME, the system hangs whenever I try to format, so I think I either have a faulty card, or that SanDisk produces crap.

Currently I\'m running the 3.13 SharpROM on an SL-5500, and have tried other ROMs, but no luck yet...

Any feedback would be appreciated  

[Anonymous]

Hmm.. if it freezes when trying on a card reader than I think you need to RMA it.  

Find out what SanDisk\'s warranty is and get a new one.


and yes IMO SanDisk produces crap..

[zbones]

They usually have a five year warranty.  I had one replaced, and I bought the sucker from the other side of the world, on EBAY.

Mind you , the replacement wasn\'t much better, wouldn\'t take an ext2 filesystem for more than a couple of hours/suspends. It works fine in my camera though  

Peter

[Anonymous]

thanks for the replies! I think I\'ll send it back for another, only this time I won\'t tinker with the darn thing...use it for oggs or something.

[Stubear]

Hello,

My SanDisk 256 SD card no longer works...after fdisk-ing it to ext2fs, it worked fine for a while, but one day the Zaurus stopped mounting it. I can see the card from both the Zaurus File Transfer program and the File Manager app, but the only entry is \'NotAvailable\'. When I try to delete this entry via Konsole, an error message says, \"unable to remove: Read-only file system\".

If you look in the dir /mnt/card and /mnt/cf when you have no cards in them you\'ll notice there is a file called \"NotAvailable\", this is to tell you that no card is available in this slot. You can\'t delete it as it is part of the read only / file system - actually you can delete it but you have to remount / read-write.

It also won\'t mount, giving an \"Invalid argument\" error message. Opie-Formatter doesn\'t see it either. When using the card reader (SanDisk 8-in-1) on WinME, the system hangs whenever I try to format, so I think I either have a faulty card, or that SanDisk produces crap.

How are you trying to mount it? Have you tried to mount manually from the console? If not try and send the error messages - that will help to give you a better answer.

Code: [Select]

mount -t ext2 /dev/mmcda1 /mnt/card

Formatting a SD card to ext2 is NOT a good idea unless you are aware of the special requirements of ext2 filesystem. If you remove a ext2 card without unmounting first you run the risk of corrupting the filesystem - this is why you must shutdown linux machines rather than just turning off the power. You will find it difficult to reformat a ext2 drive (of any discription) under windows as the windows format program assumes that the original format will be FAT file system. Try reformatting it under linux or in the Z.
Not sure of the warranty on the Sandisk cards but there is at least one maker who refuses to take returned cards that have been foramtted anything but FAT.

You could also try fsck-ing the card in the zaurus - this is like scandisk for linux, but fixes ext2 problems

hope this helps

Stu

[Anonymous]

thanks stu,

Yes, I realize the file NotAvailable indicates that nothing is mounted, I guess I got a bit desperate to make the card respond in some way  :oops:

I did not know about any special requirements for the ext2 file system, being a Linux newbie and all, but I\'m learning more every day -- that\'s why I chose the Zaurus over a Palm device, so I could take Linux and its lovely console with me everywhere I went!  

I\'m trying to mount the card simply by typing \"mount /dev/mmcda1\", and the error message says \"mount: Mounting /dev/mmcda1 on /mnt/card failed: Invalid Argument\". When running fdisk, I follow the instructions on the ossh.com site, section 2). I get the same error when using the code that you (so graciously) provided.

When I try fsck on /dev/mmcda1, the error \"fsck.auto: not found\" appears; also, \"Error 2 while executing fsck.auto for /dev/mmcda1\". Then I try fsck on just /dev/mmcda, and the error message goes a bit further into depth, with \"Couldn\'t find ext2 superblock, trying backup blocks...\" and \"Bad magic number in superblock while trying to open /dev/mmcda\". I\'m assuming here that the superblock is like the boot record? It then tells me that: \"The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem...then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: \'e2fsck -b 8193 <device>\' \".

Anyway, thanks for the reply, and no worries if I did indeed f^ my card...I just wanted to try some alternate ROMs  

[zbones]

You could try formatting the card in a digital camera.  This has been known to recover bad sd cards.  Or take it to a camera shop.

Peter.

[lardman]

Did you use fdisk to change the partition type before you mkfs.ext2\'d it?

You might want to check that the partition type matches what you want it to be otherwise fsck and mount can have troubles working out what the fs is supposed to be.


Si

[Stubear]

Okay, we are hopefully getting somewhere now.

Check that the mmcda module is loaded gefore trying to mount the card, run lsmod and there should be an entry called sharp_mmcda or something like that - sorry can\'t be more precise my Z is the shop getting repaired  :cry:

If that is not present then you won\'t be able to mount or fdisk the card till you load the module (search in /usr/lib/module/ for the correct name, or maybe someone else can post it, them insmod sharp_mmcda to load) then try mounting it again.

The other options you have is to try an fdisk the card under windows/dos then format it fat16 under dos/windows or to do the same thing under linux, if you don\'t have linux already installed on your machine, then download knoppix or morphix (bootable linux cds) and format it from them,

NOTE: knoppix is a great way to learn about linux without installing linux - just boot the cd and give it a whirl - you can\'t break anything on the cd cause it\'s read-only - if something goes wrong - just reboot  

good luck

Stu