[SOLVED] Aargh! My Sdhc Card Died In My Panda!

[Karel Jansens]

I´d describe this as an «interesting problem», were it not for the fact that it looks as if it´s going to cost me money.

Yesterday I was showing off my Panda to a friend. The last thing I did was show him (or rather, as it´ll turn out, try to show him) how clever the PND package management is. I ejected the 8GB SDHC card (SanDisk, class 2) that contains a. o. t. all my programs from my Panda (I have to confess that the umount menu option never worked for me, so I´ve been relying heavily on Linux´s ability to auto(u)mount by simply ejecting the card, after making sure that no I/O operations were taking place (i.e.: by looking at the green lightie)), and sure enough, all the program icons disappeared from the screen.

«Watch now,» I said foolishly and re-inserted the card. A lot of green light activity happened on the left side, the icon for the card´s file system came on the desktop, but no proggies appeared. I mumbled some vague excuses and hid in the toilet with my Panda to see what had happened. It turned out the file manager saw some sort of card, even mentioned its free space correctly, but insisted the card contained no files. I rebooted the Panda, but it stuck on the Pandora logo and would only boot without the card inserted.

At that moment I got a little panicky; all files on the card have backups, but it´d be a tedious job to get them all back (there´s more than just PNDs on it), so I mounted the card on a Windows XP computer with a USB card reader. Windows refused to believe there was a card in the reader, so I can´t even format it anymore.

I tried one of those SD formatting utilities (this one has Panasonic´s name over it, but I believe they´re all the same, coming from the consortium that controls the SD specifications), with the same result (although not completely identical: if I hit the utility´s refresh button, it sometimes very briefly shows the card´s drive letter, followed by a ¥ (Yen) sign, before blanking out again).

I´d rather not bin this card (obviously!), and I have some hope that the Panda might still be able to format it, mainly because it does see it, but I have to confess that I have no idea how to even begin formatting a corrupt card in Linux, let alone on the Panda.

So: Help? Again...

 

[Azuma]

Something similar happened to me, basically the same thing but my SD cards still work on my pandora. Every other computer I've tried to put my SD cards in won't read them, just as you described above. It seems very obvious that just popping the SD cards in and out is the problem and the auto-(un)mount stuff isn't working correctly. I was told that your supposed to use the panasonic formatter before using SD cards on your pandora because there's a good chance this can happen, which is pretty goddamn dumb. My wiz didn't have a chance of corrupting SD cards when I used them in the device. This is definitely an issue THAT NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED (Please!). Anyways, I do have one thing you can try, sometimes when I pull out and re-insert SD cards it gets mounted wrong and certain programs can't access the SD card. For some reason (I really have no idea why), plugging in a USB mass storage device fixes it. So if you have a flash drive or an external hardrive try connecting it and see if it fixes anything. It's a hell of a long shot but there's a chance right? Mali also told me I should pester the opt guys to release Gparted, which I can only assume is a formatting utility that the pandora can make use of. So if all else fails you can make some topics to try to get the opt to release Gparted. Sorry I can't be of much help...

 

[jdbye]

I've had corrupted cards not show up in windows with one card reader, but show up fine with another and let me reformat it, after which it works with the other card reader again - give that a shot
You really can't permanently break a SD card just by removing it at the wrong time.

Edit: You can use parted to format it on the Pandora, but it's a command line app, so it's not exactly intuitive.

 

[Pleng]

have you tried looking under administerative tools-->computer mangement-->disk management to check if the card is recognised at device level?

 

[mali]

Try it with your N800. Penguinbait compiled gparted for Maemo. I've rescued SD cards that didn't work on other computers before. Worth a shot

 

[Chero]

What does dmesg say ?
(I made the same error, card was broken, returned it to the shop and got a new one)
For those who say you can't break it : you can. When removing without unmounting you can corrupt the partition table. fdisk, SD-formatter, Gparted, ... can't solve that.

 

[mali]

^ Weren't you the one with those ADATA cards that generally got bad reviews, because they are prone to break?

 

[Chero]

^ Weren't you the one with those ADATA cards that generally got bad reviews, because they are prone to break?

Nope, sandisk extreme.

 

[mali]

^ Ah, ok.

 

[EvilDragon]

Well, when I'm working on Hotfixes, etc., I usually remove and reinsert my SD Card three or four times a day while the Pandora is on, I never had a problem.
My cheap digital camera did kill some filesystems a few times already though.

I'm pretty sure the device can corrupt filesystems (as every device can do that eventually). However, I doubt the software can kill the card. So if the card is broken (not just the filesystem), I don't think it happened because of it being mounted or not.

I've been selling SD Cards for years now - out of 100, I'd say 5 or 6 break after a few months usage like that.

Still, a dmesg output would help

 

[WizardStan]

For those who say you can't break it : you can. When removing without unmounting you can corrupt the partition table. fdisk, SD-formatter, Gparted, ... can't solve that.

Yes they can. That's what they're designed to do. They will write the partition table for you regardless of what is there. If nothing else, I've seen people manually edit the partition table (people smarter than me, I assure you) to get it to a working state again in order to recover their disks.
Actually, I believe it was someone on this very forum who managed to recover an SD card with a corrupted partition table by figuring out the exact values that were in there previously and simply getting fdisk to write the exact partitions back into the same spot on the card.
So yeah, unless your card gets physically damaged, there should be nothing that can't be fixed, at the very least with a repartition and then a format.
I would dare say that that is what happened here, when someone "loses" their card, it's probably because the partition table got corrupted. Maybe some systems get enough information to fix it where others just give up. Do as pleng suggests, checking the hardware level for the disk in the control panel. You can tell it to clear and rebuild the partition table there. If you don't even see it there, THEN I may be inclined to believe it is truly broken.

 

[Karel Jansens]

So if you have a flash drive or an external hardrive try connecting it and see if it fixes anything. It's a hell of a long shot but there's a chance right? Mali also told me I should pester the opt guys to release Gparted, which I can only assume is a formatting utility that the pandora can make use of. So if all else fails you can make some topics to try to get the opt to release Gparted. Sorry I can't be of much help...

I tried it with a USB hard disk attached, and tried it with the card in a USB card reader. In both instances, I get the same result: Unable to mount volume: no medium found on /dev/sda1, although -- interestingly -- the card is listed as a 7 GB volume, instead of an 8 GB one.

This is looking bleaker and bleaker...

 

[Karel Jansens]

have you tried looking under administerative tools-->computer mangement-->disk management to check if the card is recognised at device level?

I don´t have those tools on my Pandora...

 

[neko]

If nothing else, I've seen people manually edit the partition table (people smarter than me, I assure you) to get it to a working state again in order to recover their disks.
Actually, I believe it was someone on this very forum who managed to recover an SD card with a corrupted partition table by figuring out the exact values that were in there previously and simply getting fdisk to write the exact partitions back into the same spot on the card.

Normally you would have one big partition for the entire card. It's not hard to re-create that setup. It's only complicated if you had multiple partitions and can't remember how big they were.

 

[gruso]

Karel, Pleng meant in Windows. Assuming you're not being facetious. ;p

 

[relliker]

It might be interesting to know (for those who don't) that you can keep a copy of your sdcard partition table with:

sfdisk -d /dev/mmcblk0 > mmc.out (just guessing the sd card device name since my pda and phone use that, I haven't gotten my Pandora yet)

You should later be able to re-write the exact partition table layout back to the sd card with:

sfdisk /dev/mmcblk0 < mmc.out, as long as you have kept a copy of the file mmc.out

Check if sfdisk is available in the angstrom/Pandora OS and you might well be saved in future partition-table adventures

 

[Karel Jansens]

Thanks for the input, but I can´t do much with it sofar. FYI, I managed to copy a file from the internal memory onto the card (an Abiword template file, which actually opened Abiword when clicked, albeit glacially slowly). The card still shows only the free space it had when I last used it (1.8GB, which leads me to believe that I could format it on the Panda, if only I knew how.

Can anyone please tell me how to get an 8GB SDHC card back to pristine, formatted FAT32 state from the command line?

Update: Taking the card with the new file out of my Panda and feeding it to Windoze, gave the same old result: «Windoze no can see card. Stoopid User require to insert better card». (okay, I paraphrased, but y´all get the idea). The new file is still there after re-inserting the card into the Panda (still, it takes about ten times as long to open than a normal card).

 

[Karel Jansens]

Karel, Pleng meant in Windows. Assuming you're not being facetious. ;p

Ah. Oopsie. Here´s the thing: I can only use the card on this Windoze computer with a USB card reader (it does have a SD slot, but it´s not SDHC-compatible. I´ll check, but I´d be surprized if the Windows system manager would recognize a card inside a USB drive that Explorer cannot find.

Wait...

Nope. None of the USB devices shows anything. There is, interestingly, a «SanDisk SDDR-113 USB Device» in the libraries of removable storage (I´m transmogrifying here, this Windows is not in English), but I´m suspecting it´s not the card in question, but one of the ports of which this pc has many. In any case, it has no items and I con´t do a thing with it.

 

[Karel Jansens]

Try it with your N800. Penguinbait compiled gparted for Maemo. I've rescued SD cards that didn't work on other computers before. Worth a shot

Reasonable suggestion, were it not that my N800 is about 12,000 kms away. Forgive me for trying other stuff first...

 

[relliker]

mkfs -t vfat -F 32 -I /dev/mmcblk0 will create a single fat32 partition on the sd card. Just make sure that the sd card is really /dev/mmcblk0. I don't have a Pandora yet and cannot confirm.


EDIT: this doesn't preserve your data or check your sd card for errors. It's like a quick format in windows.