Cybook didn't survive first contact with WinXP

[ProfJulie]

Be careful when changing from one font to another. I only have two fonts installed on my Cybook, but my Cybook seems to recognize 4 place holders for fonts. I accidentally selected one of the empty place holders and my Cybook would reboot every time I attempted to open a book....it seemed to be in a perpetual loop. I was concerned that I would have to contact Bookeen for assistance, but somehow I fiddled around with it enough and was finally able to get to the menu to change the font back to a valid font.....whew!

I have half a mind to contact Cybook and get the restore procedures and firmware, so i have it on hand just in case something gets messed up and I need it.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by ProfJulie

Be careful when changing from one font to another. I only have two fonts installed on my Cybook, but my Cybook seems to recognize 4 place holders for fonts. I accidentally selected one of the empty place holders and my Cybook would reboot every time I attempted to open a book....it seemed to be in a perpetual loop. I was concerned that I would have to contact Bookeen for assistance, but somehow I fiddled around with it enough and was finally able to get to the menu to change the font back to a valid font.....whew!

Delete the font cache file in the "System" folder. That will fix the problem. It will be correctly rebuilt when you next boot the Gen3.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tompe

You probably always should eject both disks (if you have an SD cars also) before removing the cable. I nearly never mount the disk with the system on under Linux since I mount all disks manually and I have never had a problem.

The Cybook seems to be very sensitive for file corruptions and it is probably a mistake in the overall design to put for the system important files on the disks that are mounted by the user. And if it is books that gets corrupted and causes the problem there is a serious problem with their code if a corrupt file causes the continious reboot of the cybook.

Since this is a problem that a lot of people seem to have they would do themselves a favour by putting instructions on how to recover on the web page. I am tempted to ask for the recovery procedure now and saying that since the are so slow in responding I need to have the procedure available if things go wrong. I cannot wait days for them to respond.

My advice would be:

1. Put ALL your books on an SD card. If you never touch main memory, you minimize the chances of corrupting the file system. All I use main memory for is fonts.

2. ALWAYS use the "safely remove hardware" tool in the Windows system tray (or its equivalent in other operating systems) before disconnecting the USB cable.

This is what I do and I've never experienced a problem.

[ProfJulie]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Delete the font cache file in the "System" folder. That will fix the problem. It will be correctly rebuilt when you next boot the Gen3.

Thanks, I will give that a try.

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by HarryT

My advice would be:

1. Put ALL your books on an SD card. If you never touch main memory, you minimize the chances of corrupting the file system. All I use main memory for is fonts.

2. ALWAYS use the "safely remove hardware" tool in the Windows system tray (or its equivalent in other operating systems) before disconnecting the USB cable.

This is what I do and I've never experienced a problem.

That's what I've been doing, but I've been getting a good deal of file corruption on the SD card. It might be the card's fault, so I'll try again with a different card tonight.

But having this new Cybook corrupt files just by adding new content to is doesn't fill me with warm fuzzies.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

That's what I've been doing, but I've been getting a good deal of file corruption on the SD card. It might be the card's fault, so I'll try again with a different card tonight.

But having this new Cybook corrupt files just by adding new content to is doesn't fill me with warm fuzzies.

Did you run fsck and it deteced errors? I assume you unmounted before disconnecting the cable?

I wonder why this happens for many people. Can the general quality of SD cards be worse know than it was a couple of years ago so it is just an effect of this?

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by tompe

Did you run fsck and it deteced errors? I assume you unmounted before disconnecting the cable?

Ya, several times - detecting errors each time. I had several files that couldn't be deleted until I did the file system check.

I ended up reformatting the card completely and that (at least for the time being) solved the problem.

Originally Posted by tompe

I wonder why this happens for many people. Can the general quality of SD cards be worse know than it was a couple of years ago so it is just an effect of this?

I think I understand why now.

The card is hard to seat correctly. You really have to push it in to get it to "click" into place. More than a couple times, I got the card in enough to register in the Cybook while it was on, but it didn't lock into place and the card immediately popped back out. Probably corrupted things at that point.