Apps hang with large SD card (SL5500/sharp 3.0)

[cavit8]

Hey all

I\'ve got a 3/4 full 256M SD card, a 5500, and sharp ROM v3.0. When I try to start the media player or calendar the system hangs until I remove the SD card.  Apps like ToDo work fine.  I can also access media player by going to the SD card itself and clicking on an mp3, but not through the applications applet. System resource use appears the same with the card in or out, although I can\'t get there when I start an offending app as it hangs   :? Internal storage is 14M, resting memory use is 12 M, 3M buffer, 9M cache and 7M free.

Is this a ROM issue? Any tweaks I can make? (I haven\'t deleted files to see if there is a critical threshold for SD content size).  I read somewhere that OZ has better SD support.

Cheers

Cam

[lardman]

It may not be hanging but rather just trying to scan the whole card looking for mp3s which it will list for you. Have you tried leaving it (for a long time) to be sure?

If this is the actual problem then there are ways of stopping it from scanning the card.


Simon

[cavit8]

Hi Simon

It may be a file indexing issue, but I\'m not sure why that would happen in Calendar. Calendar and mediaplayer seem to be the only two apps affected: Hancomm Word, Spread, Knights Chess, Opera, all work fine.  

Playing around a bit, hang is not the right word as you suggested.  For calendar, the applet shows it\'s been activated with a change in the icon. I can open, say, ToDo.  When I close ToDo, the offending applet is back to it\'s unactivated icon.   If I remove the SD card, calendar will open, usually.

With regards to the media player, I can actually open it to the media player app screen and it shows me \"please wait\" in the Music media listing. Similarly, ten minutes of waiting and it\'s still sitting there.  I can, to some extent, use the bottom toolbar to call up the Zaurus functions, input type, or click on the umount tab.  I have Mediaplayer set to not autorefresh, but if there is something else I can do, that would be great.  
If I remove the SD card and suspend a couple of times it seems to reset with no problems.  

Cheers

Cam

[offroadgeek]

Also, while file indexing may may explain why the media player bogs, it wouldn\'t necessarily explain the calendar unless, similarly, the calendar examines all storage before running.

The calander *does* actually scan all media upon launching.  You can however change the settings for the calendar to not do that.  It\'s in one of the pull down menus (don\'t remember exactly where at the moment).  The reason the calendar does this now is because they implemented a nice new feature where you can see a list of all documents modified by date.  There\'s a third tab (if I remember correctly) which shows you this.  

offroadgeek

[lardman]

There are some issues to do with the ownership of the card (though I can\'t remember exactly what they were). You might try changing the card to be owned by zaurus, or perhaps easier, try su\'ing to root and running the offending applications (though I don\'t know that calendar would be too happy about this) from the command line and see whether they work.

The calendar does actually check the SD card for linked files, you can disable this in one of the menus. I\'m not sure whether this would be what\'s causing your problem though as it used to just fall over when you switch to month view.


Simon

[cavit8]

Thanks guys, I\'ll try all this too see if it helps. Based on simon\'s comments as per my edits above, I had played around with a couple of things, but it looks like I\'m on the right track...

Just kind of a pain to have a whack of mp3\'s that I can\'t access easily.  I\'ll make the changes to calendar and try running the mediaplayer from the command line...

I really appreciate the assistance

Cheers

Cam

[lardman]

If ownership is the problem, then you should be able to su to root, then chown /mnt/card so that zaurus is it\'s owner, or something like that ;-)

Si

[cavit8]

Changing the settings in Calendar to not check the card works fine.  

I don\'t seem to be able to chown the card, though.  I chown zaurus /mnt/card, the command runs find but ls -l still shows the directory as owned by root...  Similar if I try to chown the mp3\'s on the card.  

Leaving Media player to look at the card for a while eventually gets a memory low error and a request to close memory player.  Running the media player from the command line is no different.
I\'ll look into madplayer to see if that\'s a better option...

Cheers

Cam

[zbones]

if the card is formatted as fat, then chown will not work.

it sounds like you have some duff files on the card or some sort of loop, although if it is fat you can\'t use symlinks, so should not be able to create a loop in your filesystem.

try find / -print, let it run through and see if it stops/crashes/hangs.

if it does, then make a note of which file it was accessing when it hung, check/delete/restore this file.

I had similar problems with my 256mb sandisk card, these problems went away when I used the sandisk card for my camera and bought a lexar card.

I have several thousand files (4230, to be exact) on my card, and I get maybe a 30 second delay when apps search for files.

count how many files you have by :-
cd /mnt/card
find . | wc -l

Peter

Peter.

[lardman]

if the card is formatted as fat, then chown will not work.

What you would need to do is edit you fstab file and force the owner to zaurus. If I remember correctly you want to change the numbers at the end (which are 0 0 by default), to the group and user id of user zaurus. You can get this info from /etc/passwd.

Actually, do a google on fstab and see what it says as I\'m not quite sure that you need to alter those numbers. However you can do something in fstab to change the ownership of the card.


Si

P.S. Be careful of fstab, if you break it you\'ll be in trouble.

[cavit8]

Okay, I think I may have solved the problem to some extent.  For some reason, the card had a directory called \"Documents\" which had a complete re-creation of the root directory (all file names and the directory Documents which, too, had a complete recreation of the root, etc. etc.  I had deleted about 3/4 of the files and saw that most file names were repeated at least 6 times.  I have no idea what happened to cause this...  

I reformatted the card in Linux and even then, when I put it in the Zaurus, it shows a directory documents which is now empty except for a directory called Install_files.  I didn\'t think to terminal to /mnt/card to see if the repeated files were symlinks or what, but given it\'s vfat formatted and, as you say Peter, symlinks aren\'t an issue, I have no idea where these came from...  Anyway it seems to be working okay now.  I can certainly why the system would bog with this setup.  I stopped counting at 20 iterations of the root directory...

Hopefully this is the last of it, but thanks to everyone for their help.

Cheers

Cam

[zbones]

I have seen this on fat filesystems loads of times, I used to be a PC support technician (10 years ago).

It is a corruption in the FAT tables, and a re-format is the safest way to resolve it.

Someting on the zaurus always seems to create a documents directory when you insert the card, so one is not a problem.

As to why it happened, it could be anything, likely causes are:-
pulling the card out of a card reader on a pc, without hitting the safe to remove icon in the task bar.

a machine crashing/locking up while accessing the card.

faulty/tempremental card.

Peter

[cavit8]

Hi Peter

Thanks, that\'s quite likely what happened.  I probably clicked the card out too soon or something.

Cheers

Cam

[cgav8r]

I have the same problem on a SanDisk 256 MB card (Documents with root directory inside documents inside root dir, ad naseum).  Where on the disk are you creating a file structure so as to avoid this problem?  Are you setting a file system within the Documents or on the same level?  I would really like to avoid this pain in the future.

[cavit8]

Hi Cgav8r

I just drop files in the root directory, generally.  I reformatted the card in linux (mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sda1) and it\'s been relatively trouble free.   I also tried formatting the card as ext2, but I kept getting I/O errors on the files and had problems with the card saying it was full at 15% or so capacity, so I went back to vfat.  I\'m trying to keep a closer eye on what\'s happening, so if there is any operation that seems to pooch the FAT table, I\'ll post it here.

Cheers

Cam