RalphSchreiber

I use a 2 gig SD-Card with my Palm TX. Recently I encounter problems from time to time when copying files to card. I like to check the card for bad sectors. M$ scandisk brings no result. Are there SD-specific tools available?

Thanks

Ralph

dmitrygr

fsck can do this i believe

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Tam Hanna

Try formatting it and then copying data back from PC

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Telyx

Make sure your card reader can handle it, too... my old SanDisk reader would routinely corrupt files on even a 512MB card, but had no problem with anything smaller. My two newer readers don't goof up my 1GB cards.

Cyker

Like HDs, some SD cards do sector remapping so this sort of thing is hard to nail down.

Disk scans are generally useless; They stopped being any use when Win9x died off - The disk scanning tools in Microsoft OS' past DOS6.22 are almost completely useless and less functional than the older ones.
Norton Utilities and later ones like Nuts'n'Bolts were pretty good, and of course Spinrite, but that was then - Since the Win2k/ME era, they have either died off or become so crap they do more harm than good, except for Spinrite, except that doesn't work on USB flash disks unless you can get DOS USB drivers to work and only really deals with physical damage (Worn out drive, head crashes etc.); It's completely useless at rebuilding file structures, and of very limited use with 'soft' problems like cross-linked files and partition-table corruption.

fsck is useless too - It will fix small problems, but anything more and it's more likely to damage the data tables beyond repair, and of course how well it works depends vastly on your file system (NTFS=No hope, ext2/3=Good hope, FAT/32=Corruption Bonanza).


How old is this SD card? If it's a cheap make and heavily used, it might actually be dying. Flash memory has a much shorter lifespan than a hard disk when you're talking constant use. 2GB isn't toooo expensive now, so I'd seriously consider getting a new one - Frankly, it'd be a lot faster than screwing around with the useless disk diagnostics we have these days.

RalphSchreiber

Thanks, cyker, for the detailed info. It seems that the probs get worse rapidly. This afternooen RescoBackup repeatedly crashed direct upon start of the backup. Backup to another card works fine, so that it seems to be clear, that it is a card problem.

I have some spare 1 Gig cards. I think I will use them first before buying another. Perhabs my 2 Gigs will work after a fresh format in my mp3-player. Usually I do not change my music often, so I hope that there is a chance, that it will work in the player once it has "accepted" the files.

Concerning fsck, which is, afaik a Linux prog.: I usualy use WinXP but have Ubuntu 6.10 as 2nd OS on my computer and some time ago I copied a .prc to the card under Linux. The result was, that only this file was on the card and lots of lost blocks. Everything else has been gone and I had to reformat the card. I may be wrong but it might be, that the probs began then.

Regards

Ralph