Cybook not reading from SD Card

[AlexBell]

I'm sorry to be asking so many questions, but I'm still having problems.

The latest is that the Cybook is no longer reading from the SD Card.
I can see the SD Card when I have it in a reader, and I know that there are book files in the ebook folder and mp3 files in the music folder. I let the Cybook set up the folders so I know that the spelling is correct. But the reader will not read them. It does read the ebook files in the Cybook itself, but I know from previous experience that if I have files in both Cybook and SD Card ebook folders then the software shows both sets of files in the library.

Just before this happened I changed the titles and author fields in the ebook files and transfered the new files to the SD Card through Windows. But those same files can be read from the Cybook ebook folder now that I have transferred them there.

So what's the solution? I could format the SC Card again and start over, or buy a new SD Card. But I'd like some assurance that these ideas would work before I do it, or better still find out what I have done wrong and what works for other people with this problem.

Regards, Alex

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by AlexBell

So what's the solution? I could format the SC Card again and start over, or buy a new SD Card. But I'd like some assurance that these ideas would work before I do it, or better still find out what I have one wrong and what works for other people with this problem.

If you have a card reader, try something else first.

SD cards are formatted with the MS-DOS FAT filesystem, and are subject to some of the same problems. One issue that can bite on FAT disks is "lost clusters". The cluster is the smallest unit of disk space readable and writeable in one operation. Each cluster must have a unique address. On a FAT16 filesystem, the address is stored as a 16 bit integer, giving you a maximum of 2^16th, or 65,536 clusters.

It's possible for clusters on a FAT drive to be marked as in use but not actually owned by any files. These are called "lost clusters", and they mightily confuse the systems that try to read the disks. This can happen on SD cards as well as actual disk drives.

Put the SD card in your reader, and either open a CMD window, and type CHKDSK /F <drive letter> (where <drive letter> is whatever letter Windows assigns to the reader with a card in it), or right click the drive representing the card in My Computer, select Properties/Tools, select Check Now, and check "Automatically fix file system errors", then click Start. Both actions will do the same thing: run the Windows file system check utility on the card. If it finds lost clusters, it will allocate them to file names like FILE0000.CHK in a folder called FOUND.000. These fragments can then be deleted, restoring your file system to sanity.

If you run CHKDSK and find a FOUND.000 folder with files in it afterward, it means CHKDSK found and fixed problems. You might just find your Cybook will then correctly read the card and find the files you placed there.
______
Dennis
Who has had to do this to expansion cards, and it did fix the problems and saved me reformatting the card.

[AlexBell]

Thanks, Dennis.

I'll keep your suggestion in mind for the future. Does it make any difference that the card is formatted FAT32? As supplied it was formatted FAT, and caused a lot of problems which were resolved when I formatted it to FAT32.

Anyway, for reasons entirely unknown to me the card has come back to life. The library shows the ebooks on the Cybook itself and the ebooks on the card, and some mp3s I put on the card while I was trying to work out what was happening.

I have no idea what caused it to stop reading, and no idea what caused it to come back to life. Nor indeed do I know how to prevent the problem happening again.

Regards, Alex

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by AlexBell

Thanks, Dennis.

I'll keep your suggestion in mind for the future. Does it make any difference that the card is formatted FAT32? As supplied it was formatted FAT, and caused a lot of problems which were resolved when I formatted it to FAT32.

FAT32 is a modification of FAT to handle larger volumes. It uses a 32 bit address rather than 16, so a far greater number of clusters are supported. (The old limit of 2GB as the maximum size for a volume was a FAT16 limitation. When drives got larger, FAT needed to be changed to support them.) But the same problems can occur, and the same fix is useful.

What's weird to me is that the Cybook should want FAT32. On the one hand, it means it should be able to handle SD cards larger than 2GB. On the other, it should read FAT16 cards without issues.

Anyway, for reasons entirely unknown to me the card has come back to life. The library shows the ebooks on the Cybook itself and the ebooks on the card, and some mp3s I put on the card while I was trying to work out what was happening.

I have no idea what caused it to stop reading, and no idea what caused it to come back to life. Nor indeed do I know how to prevent the problem happening again.

That sounds like an intermittant hardware problem in the card slot.

Out of curiousity, what brand of card is it?

Regards, Alex

______
Dennis

[HarryT]

It's not unknown for cards to come loose in the slot if you don't push them in far enough for the "catch" to properly engage. You have to push the card in BELOW the level of the top of the slot until you feel it "click" into place.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It's not unknown for cards to come loose in the slot if you don't push them in far enough for the "catch" to properly engage. You have to push the card in BELOW the level of the top of the slot until you feel it "click" into place.

Been there, done that. I spent several minutes pushing in and out and jiggling it, all to no avail. There was a recurrence of the earlier problem that the Mobipocker reader hung as soon as I opened it.

So I bought a new SD Card, formatted it in the reader to FAT32, let Cybook set up the folders, and transferred some files to the ebooks folder on the SD Card with Windows Explorer. Everything seems to be working again for the moment.

I suspect however that the earlier suggestion that there might be an intermittent hardware fault with the mechanism which reads the card is correct. The Transfer Option in the latest version of the Mobipocket Reader says that there is no card detected.

I'd like of course to test the original card now that things are working again. But I seem to have lost the damn thing when I took it with me to buy the new one.

Regards, Alex