Hello everyone,

i bought my N800 a few weeks ago, and I love it so far, its no perfect but the one thing thats its supposed to do (surf the web) it does quite well!

As I got more confident with the device I installed a few programs as gpodder. After installing gpodder and running it for the first time i discovered that you need an external memory card to run the program, so i got myself a brand new 2 GB Sandisk Extreme II (with USB connector) and stuck it in to my N800, all went well until a few days ago, the N800 couldn't recognize my SD card anymore (the error message was something like this: "corrupt or unformatted memory card") and I couldnt even format it with my N800! I stuck the card in my Pc card reader and was trying to format it when i reallized that even my pc could not recognize the card... Well at that point i thought that the card was broken and as I had another SD card in the drawer I stuck that one inside my N800, all seamed well untill this morning when lightning struck again!!! After loading some music and a video on to my SD I stuck it in my N800 were accidentally I must have moved the little leaver that locks the SD card (I realized this only after getting the card out of my N800) and voilla the card had the same problem as the other one!!!!!

Can someone help me?

I knew that the SD drives in the N800 are not compatible with the lock function on any standard SD card, but how is it that if i accidentally move the leaver to "lock" and write on the card that it gets all screwd up?

Thanks in advance!

Love my N800

Please see if this bug is what you are talking about:

https://maemo.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1204

If so, can you log your report there?

Thanks,
Tim

I had a corrupted SD card and after I bought a card reader today, I discovered that I also needed to run a special SD formatting program in Windows. Just Google Format SD and you will find several. The one I used was from Panasonic, though I don't have anything Panasonic. In order to run that program I also had to install some Microsoft program that was easy to find. After I did that, I reformatted my 4GB Transcend card, no problem.

Before everyone goes out and formats all of the cards that their N800 thinks are corrupted, please try this first:

https://maemo.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1204#c1

Tim

I was wondering if I'm the only having these memory card corruption issues... I have experienced this problem with 1GB RS-MMC card (that I used without any problems on 770 before), 2GB SD card (that is now corrupted so that none of my devices (N800, Nokia phone, SD card reader) can recognize it... I'll try this SD card formatter later today to see if it fixes it....) and several times with my 4GB SD (non SDHC) card. I never had any of these issues with 770 before?

Hi first of all thank you very much for your kind help. I have read the posts you guys linked but i couldnt get my sd cards to work. The major problem is that i cant get them to read under Windows Vista, so i cant reformat them. I downloaded the samsung program and it works with other sd cards i own but the ones that were broken by the n800 are not recognized by windows.

I am stuck, maybe someone could give me some advice... I would hate to throw my new Sd away!

I have also had a Transcend SD 2GB card lose half of the available space due to bad sectors. All was fine until I was using Maemo Mapper one day and it froze saying the card was read-only.
I stuck the card into my card reader but Windows was not able to save it.
I will take a look at the SD format option mentioned above..

In my case, Windows also thought the card was unreadable, so it doesn't seem to be the bug you are concerned about.

Just to confirm that my 2GB SD card that broke when in N800 can not be formatted using the Panasonic SD formatter. This is because Windows does not recognize the SD card and reader at all... so it can not access and format it.

Oh well... I was hoping to get the card back to working condition...

Almost each and everytime I've seen a broken flash card, it's always been because of two reasons:

a) card was not unmounted before removal
b) card was in the middle of being written to when card was removed

Usually, a is recoverable by reformatting. B, however, can be a lot more damaging and permanent. This isn't N800 specific - this is for anything that uses flash cards whatsoever.