Hello,

N800, firmware 4.2007.26-8

I just added my name to the list of people who've had their N800 make their memory cards unusable:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1204

My brand new N800 has just trashed my brand new Transcend SDHC. I'm hoping that the memory chip is not physically damaged though. My suspicion is that the MBR/Partition Table has been blanked out or corrupted, which makes the card look as though it has 0 MB capacity. Am I wrong about that?

When I put it in to the N800 I get a message that says
Memory card corrupted or unformatted

Can someone send me a copy of a working MBR backup file from an 8GB SDHC card?

There are instructins about making an MBR backup here: http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/ddcommand.htm

I'm new to the N800, but I guess you could back up the MBR from a card in the external slot of the N800 to a card in the internal slot with
dd if=/dev/mmcblk1 of=/media/mmc2/backup.mbr

Then post backup.mbr as an attachement here? Is that possible?

Steven

It doesn't sound like your card is unusable, but just corrupted, and can be reformatted.

Even though your card may be reformatable now, you will eventually wind up losing the ability to do so. I had the same exact problem and it progressively gets worse.

SoSorry...

In any case, you're officially having a hallucination: According to Nokia spokesdrones, your problem does not exist because they're not having it.

Or, you bought a card off a bedouin in the Sahara desert and put it in your blender instead of your N800: it's not Nokia's fault. So there.

remember, there is no spoon...

Hope it works for you - here's my MBR from a Transcend 8GB SDHC.

Thanks everyone, Yabbas in particular.

Unfortunately, that didn't work as I expected.

I dumped your backup.mbr on to my card with
dd if=/media/mmc2/backup.mbr of=/dev/mmcblk1
and that worked fine.

Then I switched off the N800 (Switch Off! menu option), rebooted, removed the card, rebooted, and plugged the card in. The "Memory card is corrupted ..." message was shown, but that's OK.

Back in the terminal as root again, I did
sfdisk /dev/mmcblk1 -V
which told me
Warning: partition 1 extends past end of disk

Hmm. If it doesn't get the size of the disk from the MBR, then where does it come from? Maybe it isn't a problem ;-)

I plugged in the USB cable connected to my Windows machine, and started the Panasonic SDFormatter V2.0 program from
http://panasonic.jp/support/global/c...formatter.html

That made me excited because it initially showed my card size as 7.49 GB, but then when I tried to format the card the process quickly failed and reported the card size as size 497 kB.

I repeated the process chosing different options for the formatting in SDFormatter, but the results were always the same.

Oh well. Where on the SDHC card is the size reported? That seems to be what is wrong.

Certainly my card isn't repairable with a simple format. Searching around the web I've seen similar problems reported with SDHC and other devices (eg this report of an 8GB card turning in to a 5GB one - Transcend branded again: http://discussion.treocentral.com/sh....php?p=1326269), but I haven't seen any way of making the cards big again :-(

I had also a 8GB SDHC card that was recognized as 6,5GB after a read/write error in external slot (N800)! I had no chance to get full size again (also tried sd formatter from panasonic). My dealer exchanged this card!
Now, I am using only the internal slot, because my external slot corrupted three 8GB cards

My advice: contact your dealer!

Thanks for the heads up on this. I have a PNY 8GB card plus a 1GB card, and since reading this thread I realized I haven't even used 500MB of space on both of them together. So I took out the 8GB and tucked it in a drawer, put the 1GB on the outer slot, and I put the original 128MB card back in the internal slot.

Hopefully, Nokia can duplicate and fix this problem before I need more space.

Thanks!

sjmac - I can report exactly the same behavior you are having. The dd idea seemed like a good one, and indeed it did finally show the card as being just under 8GB again, but as before, as soon as anything tries to physically read or write the card, it comes to figuring that it is about 500kb in size, and fails.

Can anybody suggest anything lower level than this to try? I have a card reader coming in the next few days but i'm not holding out any real hope at this point - I think if this problem works in incremental stages, then my card is about as far gone as they get.

Nokia - I repeat my plea, if you're so convinced that the majority of users issue is FAT32 corruption, please detail the method we should use to recover these cards, as countless users here have posted that all obvious methods aren't working. How are you going to explain it to the non-tech types that buy these tablets from PC World to browse the web and copy their music collections to? People here with extensive, moderate and novice (me) linux skills alike are stumped.