Any thoughts on just formatting to ext3 or something rather than FAT/FAT32?
Seems like there are tools available to fix ext2/3 filesystems but no fsck.vfat. Very strange.
I realize that I wouldn't be able to mount the card in windows when plugged in through USB - but don't have a big issue with that.
I haven't spent much time with ext2/3 filesystems on SD on the n800, but used them all the time on my zaurus 5500. They do automount on the n800, and seem solid, but again, not much testing.
If you want to be able to read them under windows (including mounting via USB cardreader), check out http://www.fs-driver.org/. It gives you drive-letter access to your volumes. I've used it for a couple of years, read-write to both USB hard drives and the linux partitions on my laptop, and never had a problem. Beware though, that you will either have to use the control panel applet for the driver to unmount USB drives, or shutdown the machine to be sure you unmount cleanly. Still, a very useful application.
My 2GB SD card was a cheap Topram brand from eBay... thus it "could" have died just because of its "quality", or lack of...
I don't think Maemo Mapper is the reason for these issues, other than it probably gives a good workout for the File System due to frequent reads/writes. I believe the N800 kernel has some bugs/issues that cause these corruption problems.
As I said before have experienced these file system corruptions on N800 with 1GB MMC card, 2GB SD card and with 4GB SD card.
My 4 GB SDHC went to read-only mode "by itself". It occurred when the card was in the removable card slot. I was using Maemo mapper. Windows could not understand the card.
I managed to get the card writable by doing following things using N800:
- unmount the card
- create fat filesystem again in the card
- mount the card,
To add to the list. I toasted? Coastered? Wafered? my 1gb SanDisk SD.
I was applying a background image, got an error "Connection something" went to pick a different background, images folder was gone. went to file manager, and 2 out of 4 folders was gone form the card. Rebooted, and that was the end. The card was no longer recognized as existing. Tried it on my mac, who also just didn't even see it.
not sure what I did wrong, but that card is done for as far as I can tell. weird problem. Just ordered two new cards, hope they fare better.
has anyone gotten their failed cards replaced by the manufacturer??...i noticed companies like Kingston offer lifetime warranties on their cards...so, shouldn't they replace the card at no cost if it fails??....cause the failures of these cards does indeed sound like a hardware failure...
Initially I wondered whether this could be a problem with fake cards - there are a lot of fake high capacity cards sold on ebay where they simply take a small card and hack its partition table or something to make it seem much larger
However, I think that because so many people have had problems and the card totally vanishes it seems quite serious. It's one thing to have to re-partition a memory card and another for it to not even appear!
my 1gb SanDisk SD.