What Do You Do When Your Smc Screwed Up?


no_skill

gp2x! bananas! mayhem! mayham!
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Hi,

somehow i got the crazy idea to put some new games on my smc and i screwed it up.

i can't read anything from it and yafl crashes.

it already happened to me one time, and i fixed it by booting up pacrom and formatting it.

but now even pacrom won't boot.

what do you do in such a case? (note: no other smc reader here).

thanks,
i

SOLVED, SEE BELOW
 
BUY A NEW ONE, KEEP RECEIPT AND TAKE THE OLD ONE BACK IN THE NEW PACKAGING, NOBODY WILL KNOW (PART FROM ME). iVE DONE IT 3 TIMES.
 
Sometimes pacrom goes a bit weird and doesn't boot for me either, but I find that if I boot with the smc removed then insert it when the picture of pacman appears then it will read the smc and work.
 
royston79 posted on Aug 6 2005 at 10:52 AM said:
BUY A NEW ONE, KEEP RECEIPT AND TAKE THE OLD ONE BACK IN THE NEW PACKAGING, NOBODY WILL KNOW (PART FROM ME). iVE DONE IT 3 TIMES.


That's fucked up. Might as well just go steal one. It amounts to the same thing.

Also, please don't shout.
 
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woogal posted on Aug 6 2005 at 06:53 PM said:
Sometimes pacrom goes a bit weird and doesn't boot for me either, but I find that if I boot with the smc removed then insert it when the picture of pacman appears then it will read the smc and work.

already tried that. as far as i remember that was my fix last times.

i guess pacrom/yafl crashes with smc's with a broken filesystem.

you know what this calls for?

a bootthingy that does nothing but give you the option to format the smc.
would work awesome in a multiboot firmware, like i have.

apart from some security concenrs (ie: stupid/drunken users accidently emptying their smc) this'd be beatiful.
 
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what's the difference here to a "normal" win32 fat formatting?

nonetheless, i need to get a cardreader. pacrom won't boot up, because it's trying to read the smc before i get to the menu. and this is where it crashes.
 
STEALING ???? FUCKED UP ???? More Like Criminal Genius, Im not a theif, just dont beleive in being ripped off, your obviously not very bright, for a start the bog standard smc has a limited number of writes to the card (so eventually it will go wrong), second these things are produced in taiwan for 50p - £2 and sold for up to £30 in your standard electronic store. If you get alot of use out of it like me includeing save states which is a wasted write to the smc card in my eyes but very necessary at the same time you will kill it very quickly this will lead to a expensive hobby. Some people are not rich and like to conserve there money and use there mind to be a winner in this world. I would NOT (YES I AM SHOUTING PULL ONE OVER ON THE AVERAGE JOE BUT MAJOR FIRMS DESERVE THIS KIND BEHAVIOR), perhaps one day they will realise they are ripping the consumer off, Im mean a memory stick duo 2 gb is like £180 (thats the same price as the psp which it goes in). The 256mb duo is like £26 (surely both are based on the same technology and cant be that hard to implement more ram to it). Companys need to learn and so do you .. Dont Judge .. You DONT KNOW ME !!!!!!

OH BY THE WAY I LEFT MY CAPS LOCK ON, for that I dont care but if I WAS shouting you would know about, pls see above

P.S If they made these things properly I wouldnt have to buy one and take the other back in the first place. GET A LIFE !!
 
Just so your ethics are straight -- thats stealing nomatter how you look at it. I don't care either way, its your business, but call a cat a cat.

ie: Its not for you to decide if its okay to do it on whatever justificaiton is. if they make it for 1c and slel it for $100, thats their business -- you can not buy it. If swipe it, its still swiped, regardless of how bastard they were. You can buy someone elses to teach them a lesson etc.

But anyway..

jeff

They are damned expensive; for such small media, they charge the same as 1GB SD cards :/
 
SMC cards are $20 USD for 128 MB. Not too expensive, way cheaper than GBA flashcarts.
 
royston79 posted on Aug 6 2005 at 05:03 PM said:
STEALING ???? FUCKED UP ????

Just my opinion. I think 99% of the people here will agree though.
royston79 posted on Aug 6 2005 at 05:03 PM said:
More Like Criminal Genius, Im not a theif, just dont beleive in being ripped off,
Not a thief? But you rip off(something you claim not to believe in) the store(who did nothing to you but offer for sale a product you desire) and justify it by the fact that you feel ripped off by the smc manufactuer
royston79 posted on Aug 6 2005 at 05:03 PM said:
your obviously not very bright,
Maybe not
royston79 posted on Aug 6 2005 at 05:03 PM said:
you will kill it very quickly this will lead to a expensive hobby.
So find a hobby you can afford if this is too expensive for you.
royston79 posted on Aug 6 2005 at 05:03 PM said:
Some people are not rich and like to conserve there money and use there mind to be a winner in this world.
You are correct. Use your brains to get ahead in the world and invest wisely. I just don't see how stealing, however clever you think it is, makes you a winner.
royston79 posted on Aug 6 2005 at 05:03 PM said:
.. Dont Judge .. You DONT KNOW ME !!!!!!
But it's okay for you to judge me by saying I'm obviously not very bright.
royston79 posted on Aug 6 2005 at 05:03 PM said:
P.S If they made these things properly I wouldnt have to buy one and take the other back in the first place. GET A LIFE !!
In other words they are forcing you to steal.

By your logic it's not fair that my car wears out from normal use. So I should just go to the car dealership and trade it for a new one when no one is looking. Serves the auto maker right for making a crappy product. Did I get it right?

Sorry, I still think you are wrong. Nothing you can say will change my opinion on this. I don't think you will ever see what you are doing as wrong, so this is the last I will say about it. EOD.

Sorry to everyone else for the long rant and waste of bandwidth.
 
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if you got another smc, the solution is easy: boot pacrom with the other smc, go to the menu where you can format a smc, switch the working one with the fucked up one and let pacrom format it :)
 
please take the whole piracy thing to another thread /pm - i don't really care.

if someone else has this problem, i remembered how i fixed this.


------------------------------------------------
S O L U T I O N
---------------------------------------------------


1) have a multiboot firmware with pacrom or just pacrom installed
otherwise you're screwed.

2) take the smc out of your gp32

3) boot up your gp32 and start pacrom, you'll now see a screen displaying "no smc inserted" (or something like that)

4) press start, goto tools->format smc, but don't press a

5) instert smc, start the format

6) in some cases you might get thrown back to the tools menu (or a earlier one), start formatting again in this case

7) after some time (around 50 secs on my 128mb card) you should read something like
"formatting done, 10000 bad blocks" (38 in my case).

DONE!

now start pacrom link mode and throw your backup on your gp32. if you don't have one, i feel sorry for you.

really no backup?

then create these folders:

GPSYS
GPETC
GPMM

and fill your smc again.
 
I take your points on board, especially madges (maybe saying your not bright is abit harsh). Cars are probably not in the same league as mem cards but I see your point. I still think if these things were manufactured better there would be no need for this kind of activitie directed at the manufacturers but cars last longer than mem sticks even if it is a old clunk. I brought a smc card for it only to break 3 months down the line. Thats like £80 a year in card costs if were persistant, When I buy a product (especially electronic) I expect it to last at least a couple of years . I have no grumbles in re-purchaseing a piece of equipment/accesory if its done its job well/properly.

known faults in existing products need to be addressed, it like the devs, when we inform them a game may not work on a emu, they do there very best to fix that and whats worst is they mainly do it for free. We pay these people the very least they can do is improve there products. For that I'm sure we can all agree on !!!
 
royston79 posted on Aug 7 2005 at 01:03 AM said:
these things are produced in taiwan for 50p - £2 and sold for up to £30 in your standard electronic store.

I'm sorry but you're not paying for the raw materials here, you're paying for the cost of development. As technology always goes, it's expensive when new. As the product gets older and the market for it increases, the price drops.

Memory has always been especially expensive, the technology in getting more and more ram out of the same size package is always a price trade off because of such development costs.

I guess you're paying for experience, same as me when I write a program or database for someone, I don't charge how much it actully costs, i.e. the cost of how much electricity my computers used during the process. My customers pay for my experience!

The Developers of products like RAM, Drives and such must be allowed to recouperate their initial development outlay. If not, they won't have any money for further development and technology will come to a stand still. So I personally agree with initial high prices of new products.

Ho Hum.
 
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