SD Card Issue going from Pandora to WinPC

[litphoenix]

Tell me if this sounds a bit weird or not. I have an RiData 32 GB sd card formatted as fat32 (that is how they came, never bother to reformat them), and I copy over a large number of mp3 files onto the card (> 16GB). Then I also use the pandora to download some media casts and save them onto the sd card (so this would be the only writes being done to the card, that and stuff in the pandora\appdata directory for configuration settings for a few different mp3 players).


Now, if I ever reinsert the sdcard back into a winPC, it wants to do a scan to try to fix file system errors, and it hits any random mp3 directories, says the files or directory are bad and dumps all the files into that directory to a found.xxx directory, and other than the files being renamed, the mp3 files are fine. The errors that usually come up are:


Unrecoverable error in folder \music\foo


The \music\bar entry contains a nonvalid link


I have popped the sd card right after copying the files and put it back into the winPC to see if windows comes up and complains about something, but it doesn't. Any idea why windows is being a pain in the rear when it comes to the sd cards at times? Is it an issue on how the pandora is reading/writing to the sdcard that windows simply throws its hands up in the air in a tantrum? And if there is nothing wrong with the pandora writes, is there an sd card check disk type program to line up all the ducks in a row before taking a sd card to a winPC?

 

[Wox]

Every time I insert any of my flash drive/memory cards, windows says it needs to check it for errors. They always perform fine without checking, and I've had several saying they need checks for a couple years now and still no problems. I just click skip and continue with my work. I have attempted to check them before, but it takes forever and ends up asking again in a couple days. It may be the pandora, but from my experience, the disk check dialog means nothing.

 

[MarioPandio]

Good advice above. Just ignore it (the dialog, not the advice), or use the SD Mass Storage mode and then connect up the USB cable after you've set a card in that mode. Then windows never asks to do a check, although the transfer speed isn't quite as fast. I've had windows helpful check cause the card to be unreadable in the pandora and require setting it all back up again, so avoid using the windows check.


Gparted PND contains a checking tool aswell that you can use on Pandora. Just unmount the card, then the check option becomes useable. http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=gparted-gparted

 

[WizardStan]

I second the Gparted disk checking. I've always found Windows' treatment of flash media to be a little questionable. Vista and 7 may have improved, but as of XP it does do some unusual things.


On the other hand, if there is an error, Windows will happily continue to try and work around it while Linux locks the filesystem into read only mode until it is fixed, so there are trade offs.

 

[litphoenix]

Gparted for disk checking, good to know, thanks. I don't know linux anywhere near as well as windows (this is actually my first fully dedicated linux computer).


And I always suspected the sd card check with windows to be poor with SD cards, now I know for sure at least.

 

[Poem58]

Yeah, Windows is weird with SD cards for sure. I formatted a card in Windows, wrote some files then used the card in another device for just a moment and put it back in my PC slot and Windows wanted to check it for errors again. I got so tired of this I just skip it and never have problems (especially after every time I did click it, it said it checked out fine.) Just another Windows WTF thing...

 

[Wox]

I just came across this to disable it (scroll down about half-way): http://www.ghacks.net/2010/11/27/disable-do-you-want-to-scan-and-fix-removable-disk-autoplay/


Works perfect for me.