PowerDrive and SDHC are working but ....

[crezac]

The builtin drive is showing up as an SD card. This is a new symptom; not sure what caused it but it started about the same time I installed a trial version of the new Resco Explorer. Explorer reports "corrupt" databases (and it changes the file dates to sometime in 2021). Deleting the corrupt databases just makes it find/create more. However since other apps see the builtin as an SD drive and write to it something else may be causeing the problem.

The PalmOS will also write to the 15gb partition, but reports that it's totally unused.

If anyone's had similar problems can you suggest where I might look for a culprit. I know it's some type of software problem, but if I can find what's causin this I'd rather fix it than reinstall and test everything one app at a time.

Chuck

[deadpda]

Wow!
Very strange. Sounds like something corrupt at a low level.

There is an app called DBfixit that focuses on the std DBs and attempts to fix them. You could try that but.........

I would think that the smartest move would be to start over - get the PowerDrive working first and solid, and then the PowerSDHC later.

D.

[crezac]

I've tried it. None of he DBs are corrupt. Explorer just thinks they are. Also the OS seems to tell some of the apps that the internal drive with the PALM_DM and Blazer directories is actually an SD card. I'm thinking there's something hanging around from when I used to use card export or something similar that didn't play well with Explorer. I'm just hoping someone could tell me what it might be and how I might get rid of it. I've installed Card Export, Blue Files, etc.. and then uninstalled them to see if that helped but no joy. Reinstalling everything is probably going to be what I end up doing -- but the downside of that is I won't know what caused this and if it happens again my only solution is to reinstall everything again.

[dmitrygr]

e2internaldrive installed by any chance?

[crezac]

Nope. I've never used it. I do have CardSize installed, but I installed it after the problem started. CardSize only sees the 15GB "Lifedrive" partition and the SDHC card. Other apps, for example, KoolSounds by ToySoft see SD1 as the internal swap drive and see SD2 as the SDHC card.

[crezac]

Well there may have been some software component, but the main problem seems to be a failure of the CF card. Yesterday during the cycle of reinstalling PowerDrive recognized the card as being 8 gb instead of 16gb. after 3 repetitions trying to get it back to where it was supposed to be it dropped twice more. Now the card is 512MB, which is what I was using for RAM before. The card had 9GB of music and data on it at one point -- all accessible and all valid; I have a driveimage backup. I would think the card was a fake except for that and the fact that it;s been workin fine for 4 of the 5 months I had it. Anyway I'm back to using a 4gb CF now and things seem to be working.

[deadpda]

Glad you've a fix, but still a strange one. What type of CF card is it? Who supplied it? I've had interesting experiences with a SD card from ebay : worked fine at first but after a while it "lost" data - naturally when I looked into it I found it was a Fake.

But it did work correctly at first - filled to near capacity it was fine.

When I bought my CF card for the powerdrive experience I bought from a reputable online store, and thankfully, no problems since.

D.

[crezac]

It's a 16gb AData Speedy from TigerDirect.

And I'm not sure I have a complete fix. There are still some strange things going on with DriveMode. It exports 5 drives all together. The LD partition, the SDHC card and 3 more which aren't accessible, but I assume are the builtin, RAM and ROM. And there are still app data files showing up in the root of the builtin drive. If this card shrinks down to a 128MB card I'll know I have a problem ; ) but at least a consistent one.

[deadpda]

I presume you ran the update 2 on the MD before you did PowerDrive?

D.

[crezac]

Yes.

I think the problem database is devicepatchvfscache; It has 5 records and the first three look like garbage. I'm going to try restoring everythin but that file and see how it goes. If it works I'll let you know. If not, I won't bore you with the problem anymore.

UPDATE: That fixed the problem, even through a reset. But I was back to the three extra cards showing after I ran PowerSDHC . I also noticed that when the Key wasn't present and I ran PowerSDHC it said the driver wasn't loaded but the SD Slot couldn't be used even for SD cards until after a reset. So at this point I'm just going to have to wait and see if there's an update to 1.2.0.0 anytime in the future or RescoExplorer if it's corrupting that database for everyone else. Since I only use it to copy data to the LD partition DriveMode is not a big deal. As long as the rest of the system stays clean life is good.