I could swear I read this problem somewhere before but searches have failed so... Just bought a new SanDisk SD card stuck it in, put a tiny test file on it this am (7mb) and it works fine.
This evening I tried puttting larger files on it and it complains, saying it's run out of space. Impossible when I start with 240mb free. A look under 'Settings' reveals that yup, that 32mb file took up 200+ mb of space, no files visible on Explorer though. Take the card out, put it back in and the Axim asks if I'd like to format the card. I said yes, it wiped it clean and I'm back to 240mb of unusable space. Debating getting a card reader and trying to dump a file onto the card that way and see if my Axim can read the files then. Any ideas?
Ounce
(who'd love to have a single non-trouble related post)
I don't know if this will help or not, but I was trying to transfer ALOT of e-books at one time, and I got a message saying it was out of room. Yet, when I checked under settings, it said I had 30 MB free. I ended up having to create a folder and transfer the e-books into the folder because the memory card has a limit on how many folders you can have, but not how many files are in the folder.
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No dice. Attempts were to transfer a single file (movie file, tried two different ones, they payed on the cf card) onto an otherwise empty card. 32mb onto an empty 256mb card resulted in 'out of room' with gibberish (___.___ directories) or else no visible files but a look in Settings said 2-20mb free depending on the attempt. I suspect Sandisk is like buying a used car...sometimes you get lucky but usually a lemon.
I reformatted it a bunch of times (on the axim itself). It would look fine, accept about 30-40mb about 70% of the time (sometimes less) then 'fill up' on any other attempt to add a file. I gave up and returned it, barring a nice sale on some other brand they'll be no mst3k episodes for me. Oh well, I guess I could always read an e-book. Thank you for the suggestions, I'll just dodge Sandisk from now on.
(You'd think I'd know better after that 64mb mmc died on me :P )
pocket PC passion was probably the site you were thinking of.
there seems to be a lot of people who are or have problems with the sandisk CF cards. i too have had some glitches and would like to know if its really the sandisk, the axim or a bit of both having problems.
perhaps i should keep saving my pennies and get the ibm micro-drive.
I think I was the somebody and yes, my problems with a 128 SD Card mirror the observations above. In order to get some control over this, I downloaded and installed the Wintersoft utility, StorageTools (http://www.wintersoft.com/storagetool.html). I'm not advocating this particular tool and have no association with that company.
With the tool I was able to see that the SD Card was configured as a FAT16 device. Wow! This is a flashback to the early 80s, because if the same DOS rules apply to this storage medium, then the following is true:
- FAT 16 can have at most 512 files in the root directory and any folder on the root can contain an unlimited number of files up to the capacity of the device.
- The default for cluster sizes are:
- From 512 MB to 4095 MB you could use FAT32 starting with Windows 98 and use a 4 KB cluster size to save slack space. I don't know if WindowsCE supports FAT 32. If I had a 512 MB or larger disk, I certainly would try it.
At any rate, I formatted my 128 MB card as FAT16 with 2KB cluster size and StorageTools indicates 16% slack. I formatted it again with 4KB cluster and it reported 12% slack. I haven't had any problems for a day at least. A little too early to tell, but if this format, analysis and defrag tool works out, then I would have to suspect the built-in format utility of the Axim OS is shaky at best.
Don't give up on all those SD Cards yet.
I'm really irritated that SanDisk provides no user help that I can find on this subject.
I have had similar problems to what has been described. When I had the same problem of the card not reporting correct file size I used storage tools to analyse and it said the structure was corrupt. When I went back to pc explorer now there was hundreds of 4k folders there. BTW now realise this is the size of the clusters : ). and was able to delete them. I had repeated problems after a reformat with storage tools and took it back. No problems yet. I will be erasing and reloading today to see how that goes.
My theory? On my three other crashes I was messing around while coping large amounts of data onto the card. Exploring around from the axim, monitoring the space, even installing apps. I have tried just leaving it alone to concentrate on the file copy and seems to have worked. Maybe this is the problem?
I think your theory is correct. Maybe the SD Card is easily confused during read/write operations, but why this would cause the thing to fill up with CHK files is what I want to know.
I'm now using two utilities to deal with my SanDisk 128 MB card, FlashFormat and StorageTools. So far neither of these tools has ever reported a problem with the integrity of this card since I reformated yesterday. When and if the thing misbehaves again, I'll refuse the OS prompt to format and try to pin down the problem.
In the interim, I'll continue copying and saving files to the device to see what happens.
I bought 2 of the sandisk 256mb SD cards and had the same problem with both cards where the card would corrupt or state it was out of space. I went to best buy and bought a PNY (yuk! :P ) 128mb sd card and it works great now. I'm not sure if the problem is a SANDISK issue or 256mb card issue. All of the hits I have found on the net about this issue have been with people using the 256mb SD SANDISK card. Go figure...
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