RC6-12 wrecked my SD card

Discussion in 'Calibration, Help, and Troubleshooting' started by jet, Jun 6, 2016.

  1. jet

    jet Well-Known Member

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    Ok, this is annoying. If it happened to me, it might happen to someone else so here's the problem and some things I tried for a fix. It could also be specific to this version of the code and not a problem on other builds.

    I put the test/prep files on a spare micro 16Gb card formatted for FAT, put it in an SD adapter and stuck it in to the controller and tried to read the data. Got nothing -- it could see the card, but it couldn't see any files on the card. After removing the card (from the far too tiny slot!) I went back to my Mac to verify the contents. It mounted as s 32.1Mb (not Gb) unreadable volume.

    OS X:
    Disk Utility can't format/partition it.
    fdisk reports a wiped partition table:
    $ sudo fdisk -d /dev/rdisk4
    0,0,0x00,-,0,0,0,0,0,0
    0,0,0x00,-,0,0,0,0,0,0
    0,0,0x00,-,0,0,0,0,0,0
    0,0,0x00,-,0,0,0,0,0,0

    On linux, gparted reports an "unrecognized disk label" when I try to create a new partition table.

    On OS X and linux, you can sometimes fix things by doing some damage with dd...

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<device name>

    ...but this didn't work. Also no luck mounting it on various USB adapters as well as a SD Card adapter in my MBP and Lenovo laptops.

    Everywhere I go, it's a 32.1Mb card.

    I tried formatting it in my FIIO X5 music player, came out as a 32.1Mb card.

    I tried the Sandisk format utilites both in OS X and Win8, OS X reported a 32.1Mb format, Win8 reported that the write protect was set.

    There's a long thread on the sandisk forum about this problem, my take is that the card is physically damaged and cannot be repaired.

    http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Mobile...gb-card-seems-to-have-died/td-p/291578/page/6
     
  2. jet

    jet Well-Known Member

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    I found a 1Gb SD card (from an old camera), it is being read just fine and calibration prints are underway.
     
  3. Tom De Bie

    Tom De Bie Well-Known Member

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    Probably your card was faulty or something went wrong after you put the data on it (ie, forgot to unmount it). The card reader in the lcd only does a read from the card so I think that is not to blame...
     
  4. Stian Indal Haugseth

    Stian Indal Haugseth Well-Known Member

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    Sound like a defective card yes. I hope it wasn't the display card reader ruining it. Cards do die :mad:

    With dd you have gone as low level a user can go. This is not just an forgot to unmount because dd would fix that.
     
  5. jet

    jet Well-Known Member

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    The card was working just fine the few minutes before when I formatted it and loaded on the files, then ejected it. I've got two more cards coming in the mail today that are 8Gb MicroSDHC, we'll see.

    Over on adafruit there are some warnings that SDHC cards won't work with older SD readers, but nothing about the card being damaged.
     
  6. Dr Jeep

    Dr Jeep Well-Known Member

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    there used to be a scam circulating where small (say 16/32mb cards) where loaded up with a doctored device id, partition table and a strange self overwriting loop fs to sell them as bigger cards. usually they were branded up as a "good" make. Did your spare card come from a reliable source ?
     
  7. jet

    jet Well-Known Member

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    I'm pretty certain it came from Sparkfun or Adafruit with a BB. I was using it as a 4Gb and 8Gb filesystem and running linux on a BBB, requires a bit more than 32Mb.
     

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