SDHC Issues - Update

[Ayukawa]

Well, received a new Kobo in the mail, and trying to load books to the SDHC card in the kobo with "Send to Card A" in Calibre still causes the same problem. It looks to be a limitation of the hardware/firmware, rather than a defect. I haven't tried putting stuff on it via a card reader yet, I'll be doing that next. It would be nice if this was a firmware thing that could be fixed in an update.

[cutterjohn42]

Originally Posted by Ayukawa

Well, received a new Kobo in the mail, and trying to load books to the SDHC card in the kobo with "Send to Card A" in Calibre still causes the same problem. It looks to be a limitation of the hardware/firmware, rather than a defect. I haven't tried putting stuff on it via a card reader yet, I'll be doing that next. It would be nice if this was a firmware thing that could be fixed in an update.

Hey! I think that I was having the same problem yesterday(just got a kobo-wifi) and figured that calibre was borked for kobo in that version...

Also popped up some error when unmounting, but initially it LOOKED like the book had been loaded and I tried both INTERNAL & SDCARD and neither worked. (Ubuntu 10.04 x86-64)

I got it to load the book properly by manually copying it to internal memory and then unmounting it manually, but haven't gone beyond that yet as I was in a hurry and wanted to take the kobo-wifi with me to start checking batt life given the top-running relevant threat ATM.

i.e. I'm NOT entirely sure that it's a kobo fw thing or calibre just being borked... I'm leaning towards borked calibre as it's always had a f'ed way of handling devices and was even worse back when it was always trying to mount them even when they were already mounted... used to drive me insane having to remember to do the workaround and then trying to find new one when koval tried to "fix" mounting...

I also started getting the Kobo-wifi shuts down now instead of sleeps when actually in the sideloaded book reading it... still sleeps OK if I got the I'm Reading (home) menu though... oddly enough it worked fine sleeping inside of the book all yesterday and earlier this morning... -> I'm thinking that something's getting corrupted...

[carlb]

I'm using a 2GB SD card (not SDHC) on a Kobo wi-fi and I do find the firmware to be buggy in that, if there are any damaged *.epub's on the card at all the device will go partway through "Please wait while your Kobo eReader processes GNU content" and then reset on basically an endless loop.

In my case, the error (which the Kobo does not explain to the user before rebooting endlessly) was a damaged "invalid zip file" (an .epub is a zipped web page wrapped in some xml, so a damaged file won't even unzip).

The same file in main memory would likely just cause the scan for new books to silently terminate prematurely, even if that leaves hundreds fewer volumes on the device's 'books' menu than appear in Calibre or on a desktop PC's file manager.

It would be preferable if the firmware were changed to detect a damaged file (oh look, it's "Touring the Onondaga Parkway - by Megabus Inc.epub"), flag just that one .epub as smushed beyond repair and skip it instead of breaking the entire scan for new .epub's. Unfortunately the current (1.7.4 wifi) Kobo isn't quite that clever.

Have you tried taking a 2GB card, putting one lone *.epub file on it and seeing if at least that much is correctly recognised? If that much is good, then you could try adding more to see where or when things start to break.

[cutterjohn42]

... I still haven't gotten around to testing in 32b Vista yet... working on NC hacking, well some bootable SDs taking forever to write w/my USB reader as the builtin nb reader failed to created a bootable SSD apparently...

I don't think that using a nonSDHC 2GB uSD is going to make any difference as the wifi is clearly SDHC capable since it can read files manually written to my 4GB uSD SDHC card using a dedicated reader. I just keep checking here to see if they've released the fw update for the WiFi since I never turn on WiFi since the browser is useless(hopefully that will change) and the store is AWFUL(well UI is awful and it was a mistake to break it from the rest of the UI, e.g. having to navigate to arrows onscreen and centerpush v. left/right dpad... center push dpad should be for select, yeah I know it's the browser but sheesh they could've modified it for store use unless that means that they're going to allow general browser usage eventually... limited value but it could be handy at times...)

[EDIT]
aaaahhhhh.... writing this froyo image to my uSD via USB reader is like the energizer bunny, it keeps going, and going, and going, and...
[/EDIT]

[carlb]

I tried a 16GB SDHC card and can confirm that the Kobo firmware is not operating correctly when attempting to write to the card.

Calibre gives the following errors (Windows version is shown, although the issue would exist on Linux or any other OS) with the larger card:

Errno 13: Permission denied: u'I:\\metadata.calibre'

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\device.py", line 64, in run
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\device.py", line 308, in _books
File "site-packages\calibre\devices\kobo\driver.py", line 222, in books
File "site-packages\calibre\devices\kobo\driver.py", line 650, in sync_booklists
File "site-packages\calibre\devices\usbms\driver.py", line 308, in sync_booklists
File "site-packages\calibre\devices\usbms\driver.py", line 305, in write_prefix
IOError: Errno 13 Permission denied: u'I:\\metadata.calibre'

calibre, version 0.7.46
ERROR: Error: Error communicating with device

Error 23 Data error (cyclic redundancy check): 'I:\\books'

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\device.py", line 64, in run
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\device.py", line 372, in _upload_books
File "site-packages\calibre\devices\usbms\driver.py", line 184, in upload_books
File "site-packages\calibre\devices\usbms\device.py", line 971, in create_upload_path
File "os.py", line 157, in makedirs
WindowsError: Error 23 Data error (cyclic redundancy check): 'I:\\books'

As the 2GB SD card was working properly (once any broken or damaged *.epub's were removed) it would appear that the only way to write to a larger card is to insert it into a standard card reader (not a Kobo) and copy the *.epub files directly. Even then, expect to be looking at "device is indexing new content" or startup screens for a very long time before the Kobo might actually let you read the contents of your new SDHC card.

I suspect this confirms (from directly across the border) the pattern reported by the original poster?