Bad Gp32 Or Bad Smc's?


Valeos

Still Fresh
Joined
May 23, 2004
Messages
38
Location
Matthews, NC USA
Website
Visit site
I use Slubman's FW and noticed files that I had supposedly deleted were still showing up in the application menu. As a precautionary measure, I used the format option and reformatted the card using full format. Upon completion, it listed that there was 1 bad block. I thought my card was going bad, so I ordered several via Banana PC.

When these arrived, I went ahead and formatted them in my GP32. A couple had 3 bad blocks, 1 had 4, and 1 had 5. Is this that common? I can format these just fine on my PC using XP with no bad blocks at all. As I test I tried formatting the same cards several times, and they returned the same number of bad blocks.

Is the GP32's flash reader/writer more sensitive and I have crappy SMC's, or is something wrong with my GP32?
 
I bought 2 SMCs from them, and they work fine.

I actually had a bad SMC, a SANdisc ... but got it over a year ago.
 
A couple of bad blocks is no problem. It is supposed to
be expected. Its a small amount to worry over.
 
my brand new SMC had a couple of blocks missing the first time I formatted it ;)
 
I recently put my smc in the washing machine (by accident, not experiment). It worked fine afterwards. Only when I tried to put on some more ogg's it came back with a disk full error even though there was still 60 megs free. I formatted the thing with pacrom, and I got 137 bad blocks. Free space is 124 megabytes or smth.

So I wouldn't worry about your one bad block :)
 
Thank you for your replies. I was not aware that bad blocks on new SMC's were to be expected. When I noticed all of them had the issue, I became a little concerned. I suppose it is much like the hard drive technology of 20 years ago where bad sectors were commonplace even on new models due to the manufacturing process.
 
Back
Top