View Single Post
Old 07-13-2008, 11:58 PM   #2
DMcCunney
New York Editor
DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
DMcCunney's Avatar
 
Posts: 6,384
Karma: 16540415
Join Date: Aug 2007
Device: PalmTX, Pocket eDGe, Alcatel Fierce 4, RCA Viking Pro 10, Nexus 7
Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexBell View Post
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.

Last edited by DMcCunney; 07-14-2008 at 12:20 AM.
DMcCunney is offline   Reply With Quote