Any patterns you've noticed such as programs you were using prior to corruption...etc will help in the bug report.

Dtrask,

Thanks for the tip. I'll try it later today.

This probably won't be helpful, but... I had a 1 GB MMC card die on me with my 770. I couldn't reformat it using linux or windows. I decided not to throw it away, and ended up with a n800 soon after. About 6 months later a friend loaned me his Treo600 to use while in Europe. It takes mmc cards, so I decided to pop int in to see if it would recognize it. It did! I reformatted it with the Treo and now it works just fine in my n800. Very odd... Again - I don't think this helps your particular situation, but maybe it offers a glimmer of hope that your cards aren't trashed. Good luck.

*sigh* More people that think Nokia should pay because they don't know how to use SD cards.

If there were a real issue here, it would most likely be against the Linux kernel driver for the SD card reader... but we're using an older kernel and there's been no public outcry.

Offhand, are the cards mounted sync or async in the N800?

Doesn't the lack of an outcry suggest it has nothing to do with the Linux kernel and perhaps more to do with the N800 hardware or design? Maybe it's a under/over voltage issue which may or may not be software related.

It looks like we're getting to relive the old 3.5" floppy disk fiasco all over again, and with its successor, not too surprisingly.

I remember formatting and filling 3.5" floppies, then trying to read them on a different PC, which would cheerfully trash them. Or encountering tolerance issues that meant playing with the floppy for several minutes until the PC finally got tired of its little game and read the thing.

Floppy incompatibility issues never went away, either, which is why for my legacy floppy needs I'm just gonna buy a USB-based drive and hopefully never encounter this again. I'm also hoping the new iteration of this old problem is resolved better...

Texrat is on to something here. It is not just the N 800 that gives SD card issues. My 8G Transcend card went west on the weekend. It was formated in my N 800, but I was transferring files to it using the Simpletech Bonzai card reader. Transcend's support response was "use our reader"

There is no doubt that the problem exists, and has done so for a while now.

A good scan through all the reports and comments do seem to indicate that the latest firmware has caused more units to display the delightful card trashing tendencies and Nokia is aware of the problem - although has yet to be able to recreate it.

Personally I love my N800. It has gone from being a toy or gadget to an almost indispensable tool in my daily communications arsenal. All I need to move email there is i) a decent keyboard as I have never managed to get my BT keyboard working right and ii) a better email client (say Clawsmail) that is actually integrated with the Hildon UI (think nice pulsing icon when new mail arrives).

My Transcend 8Gb SDHC card was packed with MP3, video and a whole heap of maps when it got fried. Downloading a couple of podcasts killed it, and whilst it was recoverable twice from a WinXP machine it then started to lose capacity with each subsequent reformat. Transcend where awesome and replaced it.

I had run this card very hard for a couple of months with Philip Langdale’s updated kernel on the previous firmware with not a single problem.

Two days after the new kernel and it all went south.

Philip Langdale has released a kernel patch for those bits that Nokia left out but as yet I haven't had the time and balls to give it a go as I just can't justify buying more SDHC cards to experiment with.

Please do get onto the bugzilla report and get any problems documented as we really want Nokia to sort this as soon as possible.

Joshua,

Good suggestion. Earlier today for giggles I tried formatting the dead cards (3) in my new Fuji digi cam. after repeated attempts 2 worked, 1 didn't. This has at least gotten my laptop to recognize the cards. I then tried various methods of trying to recover the lost files. All failed. I have a program from sandisk that comes with the ExtremeIII series CF cards and another freeware trial CardRecovery V3.4. Both programs are able to read only 40 files from one card but can't recover them. The other card was fully formatted and wiped clean and no files can be recovered and there are 224272 bad sectors on the card. I'm trying a zero overwrite of the fully formatted card in hopes of recovering the bad sectors, but doubt it will help. Just finished and it didn't. I'm going to keep trying on the other card but think I will have to fully format it and say good bye to everything that was on it.

I have had no problems with MMC cards... I'm thinkin'
If Nokia can't replicate it via software it very well may be a hardware issue as M'house suggests.

If this is the case, Nokia should look at your specific unit as it continues to "replicate" the problem (3 times).

Perhaps it is a combination of production tolerances and your unit happens to have all the wrong numbers. A look at your unit by Nokia may be insightful and lead to corrective production tweaks.