[Altivo]

OK, factory reset done. Things still seem weird.

There are some improvements, but I'm not sure the behavior is what it should be. I thought the reset would put me back at the original firmware and I could reapply the 1.9.11 update. That didn't happen. The reset did erase all my settings and the books in the main/internalmemory, but remained on version 1.9.11. So I put the settings back in, time, date, and so forth.

The only book showing on the home screen was the Kobo ereader user guide. The settings screen did not show the external memory chip, which has been one of my complaints all along. So I got daring and popped the SD chip out while the device was powered on.

To my surprise, the display announced that the SD had been removed, please wait while we update, etc. So I waited. When the display came it did the "adding new content" thing, which took several minutes. There are 150 books on the SD chip.

When it finished, all those books appeared as "new" titles on the home display. However, instead of showing the actual title of the book, the display showed the file name. This is OK if the file name is a reasonable representation of the book title, but they are not always so. The old firmware displayed the title from the internal metadata in the file. However, I was pleased that at least the external memory was recognized, and now it showed on the settings screen. I was able to open a couple of books and scroll through pages.

Then I powered the Kobo down. When powered back up, it no longer could see the external memory and all of the 150 titles, including the ones I had opened, were gone from the books list and the "I'm reading" list.

I ejected the SD again, got the same "wait for update" messages, and this time when I reinserted the SD nothing at all seemed to happen. However, when I flipped over to the book list, the 150 titles from the SD were back in the list. The ones I had opened were retaining my last page read information as well, and reappeared on the "I'm reading" list after being opened.

Unfortunately, each time I power the Kobo down, it loses awareness of the SD card. It only recognizes it again after I eject and reinsert it. And it does not keep the currently active book on the "I'm reading" list, which means I have to go retrieve it from the 250 titles in the books listing (including the pre-loaded books) which is slow, cumbersome, and pointless.

Oh, and the test book I was using earlier in this thread now displays with margins and a much more readable page. I haven't gotten far enough to see what happens with the Italics, etc.

I found a Windows box with a current (1.18) version of Calibre, and it does indeed recognize the Kobo now, but sees only the internal storage. If I eject and reinsert the SD chip while connected to Calibre, an error message appears saying that Calibre failed to access the external/auxiliary storage in my device. It suggests that the card is corrupted or needs to be reformatted. If I'm interpreting the messages correctly, it says that it got a permission denied while trying to write Calibre status info to the drive.

So now a new question arises. As far as I can tell, the SD chip I'm using is formatted in Windows FAT32, and has no errors. The write protect tab is set to "off", and both Windows and Linux are perfectly happy to read and write to it. Could there be something wrong that is too subtle for Windows scandisk to catch? I seem to recall being told to format the SD for the Literati by inserting it into a camera rather than letting Windows format it. This one is using the pre-written FAT32 format that was installed to it by the manufacturer, I believe.

This all represents some progress, though things still are not quite what I expected.