SD Card issue

[Writing Ronin]

Had my Pandora on watching some video and the battery ran down to 0 by accident. So I rebooted it, but found that all my icons were missing from my desktop.


Checking the SD cards, I discovered that my main SD card is now lablled as


ckList></p


and while I can access the contents (on both Pandora and PC) the Pandora is not recognising it for apps or such. Bit of a worry, as it's been fine for the better part of the year and now suddenly, this.


Any help?!

 

[Mr Rob]

Could be a couple things, but may need some more information first:


What format was your SD Card in?


My main thought is that the sudden shutdown (due to low battery) left the card in a bad state (much like pulling the plug on a desktop computer; modern filesystems help a bit but most SD cards don't use modern filesystems). If that's the case, there are commands to try to fix this, depending on what format it was.


My second thought (far less likely) is that the card simply died.

 

[Writing Ronin]

What format was your SD Card in?

Thanks for lending a hand so quickly! The card is in FAT32.

My main thought is that the sudden shutdown (due to low battery) left the card in a bad state (much like pulling the plug on a desktop computer; modern filesystems help a bit but most SD cards don't use modern filesystems). If that's the case, there are commands to try to fix this, depending on what format it was.

I suspect you're right with this guess - I was watching the final episode of Thundercats at the time and it was paused, so the SD card was being accessed when the battery died. My own stupid fault, I try not to let that happen, but got caught on the phone (and bizarrely enough, trying to fix my SD card in my HTC as well,which has come up with error messages). So the Pandora probably thought I was trying to pull it out while 'hot'.


I can still take the contents out from it and dump them on to something, so they're not a total loss, but it's a 32 gig card, so it would take a while...

 

[Mr Rob]

Ah, okay. For the record, I'm far from a Windows expert, but based on what I could find try this....


First off, back up what you can. Since you said you can take the contents and dump them somewhere, do that just in case.


From there, try 'chkdsk' from a Windows computer. There's a full write up on what to do here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265. If it's not too bad, it'll just go through, fix what it needs to, and you're done, no worries.


If you want to do the repair on the Pandora itself, there's a writeup here: http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/2325-solvedscan-disccheck-disc-tool-on-pandora/. Requires a bit more work, as you'll need to install the required bits (they're not in a PND to my knowledge, so you'd have to opkg install them; I'd try the Windows solution first).


Good luck.

 

[Writing Ronin]

Cheers - gave it a try via Windows, still no dice Showing the same thing when I plug the SD card in...


EDIT: Ok, update... I dumped it into Windows again and thought what a typical dumb-ass non-tech guy like myself would think during such time of desperation: "what if I rename the card?" So I renamed it and, somehow, the card now works as normal. Bizarre.


So I can only guess that the surge messed up that aspect of the card and made it unrecognisable to my Pandora. I'm still a bit wary of it, but I sure as hell wont let the battery run down again while it's accessing the SD.


Thanks for your help, Mr Rob! I'll keep tabs on it to see if any errors pop up in the short term...

 

[Mr Rob]

Ha, it works just fine? Odd.


Don't forget about regular backups. Caution is always good, especially after putting 20 hours into an RPG!

 

[Writing Ronin]

You're right there, and after two card failures yesterday across two entirely different devices (not to mention my work content managment system went down the same day... odd) you'd think I'd take it as a sign to get stuff backed up - which is exactly what I'm going to do this weekend now. Warning, well and truly, heeded.


One weird thing, though.


After changing the SD card name and it's working, my Pandora has now created a folder on the NAND called:


ckList>?<


Inside it contains a folder named:


p


Neither seems to do anything to my system, and it's barely 224b, so it's not exactly taking up any space... but I cant delete it. It's a mild concern that whatever affected my SD card has now taken up it's name on the NAND, so I'm tempted to reinstall Hotfix 6 to 'flush' the NAND (if it would do that?)


I dont mind it sitting there if it does nothing, despite it being untidy and strange, but if it's a bizarre thing which is going to cause future problems, then...

 

[Prometheus]

It's not going to cause problems, and don't worry about reflashing it. That can happen on Linux if something is removed unexpectedly - you just need to be a superuser to remove it.


You can do this from the GUI, if you prefer, by opening a terminal, typing sudo thunar and navigating to the offending directory and removing it - remember to quit the superuser Thunar after doing this, of course.


As far as the bizarrely coincidental SD Card failures go, do you mind if I ask where the cards came from?

 

[Writing Ronin]

It's not going to cause problems, and don't worry about reflashing it. That can happen on Linux if something is removed unexpectedly - you just need to be a superuser to remove it.


You can do this from the GUI, if you prefer, by opening a terminal, typing sudo thunar and navigating to the offending directory and removing it - remember to quit the superuser Thunar after doing this, of course.


As far as the bizarrely coincidental SD Card failures go, do you mind if I ask where the cards came from?

Lovely, that's got it - thanks Prometheus.


My Pandora card is a Bytestor – I have a 32G class 10 (the one that went yesterday) and a 16G class 4 one (my back-up card, otherwise my second slot is occupied by a 32G Kingston class 4), all purchased from Amazon. Yesterday has literally been the only incident I've had with any of them since I owned my Pandora, which is now about a year and a half. I was so paranoid about them that I must have read every single entry you, Gruso and several others did on both forums before making a choice, heh.


My mobile phone micro SD I think is a Kingston. I suspect my HTC is causing the problems more so than card itself, but whatever it is, it's rendered it rather unreliable.

 

[Prometheus]

Glad that the tip helped.


As for the cards, I just wanted to verify that they weren't from eBay fake-hawkers, as you might imagine. :lol: I guess it is just a freakish coincidence.

 

[Writing Ronin]

Ha, yes, I suspected you were thinking it may be that - but I read so many warnings from you guys that I stayed well clear of eBay ;-)


The lesson seems to be to not leave Thundercats (or any other video file) running on a low battery *cue a jolly laugh from all the Thundercats apart from Snarf, fade to black, roll credits* :lol:

 

[Mr Rob]

And there are some better filesystems to use for something like this (ext2 is my choice, although it won't give you compatibility with Windows, which can cause problems for most users). Fat32 always gave me problems on unclean shutdowns.

 

[Writing Ronin]

I'll have to be extra careful, I guess - I tend to use Windows as my 'quick change' way of sorting out files at work without it being too conspicious