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tanalasta
11-21-2003, 11:03 AM
I recently bought a 128MB sandisk/toshiba OEM SD card and formatted it FAT16/16kb cluster size. This worked well but I was getting a lot of slack space and decided to reformat it to FAT 32/512b clusters. Well... it took only 5 minutes for the whole card to corrupt, files/programs to disappear in lost clusters and both storagetools/flashformat refused to fix the card.

So the point is, has anybody else had a similar experience? Especially with sandisk cards which some people have horrible experiences with. I've reformatted the card back to the way it was originally and it seems to be working now.

I suppose the old adage "if it's not broken, then don't fix it" applies :oops: I know i just wasted the last 5 hours AND lost stuff on my SD card which i didn't have a suitable backup of. (like my gangsta race player data!!!)
Steven Cedrone
11-21-2003, 04:10 PM
You backed up the data prior to formatting the card, then formatted, then copied your data back to the card...

Once you did that, the data became corrupt, forcing you to reformat again?

If that's the case, can't you just recopy the data to the card again???

Steve
Pat Logsdon
11-21-2003, 05:08 PM
I've had a few SD cards fail - all made by SanDisk. In the course of trying to figure out what happened, I read that for cards higher than 64mb, FAT 32 should ALWAYS be used. If it isn't, corruption can occur, possibly due to the poor controller than SanDisk uses.

Unfortunately, once your data has been corrupted once, it's almost guaranteed that it'll happen again. To save time, frustration and data, I'd contact SanDisk now and get a new card.
tanalasta
11-22-2003, 05:21 AM
Umm... i did try to backup the storage card data but pocketbackup plus kept giving me communication issues so i gave up. So all i did was uninstall all the programs on the storage card, format it to FAT32 and then reinstall all the programs. It was halfway through the manual reinstall that I'd noticed half my programs i'd just installed disappeared. Then i installed/ran storage tools AND flashformat which confirmed the card was "bad".

So i started from scratch and formatted it back to FAT16 and it seems to be working fine now... I suppose i could refund the card, but seeing it's from ebay it's a bit of a hassle. And i need my pocketpc!!!
Steven Cedrone
11-22-2003, 06:05 AM
You don't need a Pocket PC based application to back up your card. Just a card reader and a few minutes...

I back up my cards (CF and SD) to my computer at least once a week...

Steve
tanalasta
11-23-2003, 10:59 AM
Yeah, I realise that... but i don't have an SD card reader :oops: The SD card is still working perfectly now that it's been reformatted to the way it was before FAT16.

On a side note, has anybody else noticed SD cards tend to read a lot faster when they're half empty as opposed to nearly full?