CF Disk Corrupt

[tomas]

From time to time, I encounter this problem: While powering-up notebook I have got "Disk corrupt" message and the CF is not accessible. Power off and on does not help, ejecting and re-loading CF does not help. The only cure is to load the CF to the PC CF-reader, let it be accessed once from PC and put it back to netBook. And voila, CF is readable again... This happened approx 4 times during the last year. Does anybady have similar experience ?

[wanman]

I have not had too many problems with my CF apart from occasionally, when copying large amounts of data to the CF from my PC using my USB CF reader. Sometimes a couple of the files will become corrupted. Although this does not affect the reading ability on my Netbook, I am unable to remove these corrupted files and have to re format the CF.

I have put this down to the way I format my CF (using Atelier's Smart Format). I set the number of sectors per cluster to two (4 is default). This is in an attempt to reduce wasted space for the multiude of very small files I keep. I assume that PC occasionally struggles with this setting but most times it works fine.

What make of card are you using?

Regards

Si

[nmbaker]

Had the same problem on Saturday with a 1GB microdrive. Been adding my web pages to the card to view when out and about (some 19k pages). Used my camera to download via USB as quicker - but encountered the problem.

Reformatted card, as I had backed up only minutes before and retried with no problems. I think that maybe I had unlinked before all the files were happily sitting on the card, although the PC showed completed job, I noticed on second attempt, the camera led was flashing activity for a further couple of minutes.

Since I was working from home today, decided to repeat, and can conclude that the writing activity continues after the files themselves have been copied for 3 minutes in my case.

Anyone else have similar experiences?

[wanman]

and can conclude that the writing activity continues after the files themselves have been copied for 3 minutes in my case.

Mmmm interesting. Will have to remember that for future attempts.

May also be worth while shutting down all applications on your Psion before switching off with the intention of removing the CF card just to be on the safe side.

Thomas, although this is probably not the cause, what is the condition of your backup/main battery? Do you run your Netbook until the main battery c is empty (or left switched off for 2-3 week periods? If applications are running from D: Drive when the main battery reaches a certain level of discharge, it has problems writing to the CF and this could be the cause of your occasional problem.

Si

[diem]

Tomas,

Do you format the CFs on the Psion or the PC? It would seem odd that the PC is capable of 'rescuing' a disk that the Psion can't read? Also, do you use 95/98/Me or NT/2K/XP? The former will tend to mess up the file structure of CF cards do to the legacy of the DOS 8.3 file name format.


Regarding PC CF read/writers, it is very true that the Windows 'copying' dialog diasappears before the copying has actually finished taking place (at least on NT/2k/XP). The rule is never take the card out until the 'activity' LED has stoppped flashing.

[tomas]

wanman wrote:
"What make of card are you using?"

I USE 1GB MICRODRIVE


nmbaker wrote:
"the writing activity continues after the files themselves have been copied for 3 minutes in my case"

UNDER WINDOWS, YOU CAN SET CACHED WRITES ON OR OFF. WHILE ON, SITUATION IS AS YOU DESCRIBED - WATCH OUT FOR THE ACTIVYTY LED ON THE CF READER.

BUT PSION DOES NOT USE CACHED WRITES SO THERE SHOULD BE NO PROBLEM WITH IT.


wanman wrote:
"what is the condition of your backup/main battery ?"

YES, LOW BATTERY CAUSES "NOT ENOUGH POWER FOR CF OPERATION", BUT IT WAS NOT THIS CASE, MY BATTERY WAS ALMOST FULLY CHARGED.


diem wrote:
"Do you format the CFs on the Psion or the PC?"

FIRST CORRUPT APPEARED WHILE I HAVE NOT FORMATTED THE CARD YET, I USED IT AS IT CAME FROM STOCK.

THAN I REFORMATTED IT UNDER ATELIER'S. NEXT CORRUPT FOLLOWED AFTER SOME MONTHS...

SO I REFORMATTED AGAIN UNDER WINDOWS. BUT CORRUPT APPEARED AGAIN AFTER A FEW MONTHS.

THEN I REFORMATTED UNDER ATELIER'S AGAIN, WITH DIFFERENT SETTINGS. WAS OK TILL YESTERDAY - CORRUPT APEARED AGAIN...

As I wrote before, I did not loose any data by these corruptions. If I loaded the card to the PC reader it seemed OK and as I made the windows to "touch" the card, it was than OK on Psion too.


I use Windows ME (home) and 2000 (office) with the latest psiwin.


I suspect that these corruptions are connected with CF's root operations. While psions says "disk corrupt" and I cannot see the root, the rest of the card seems ok even under psion - checkdisk is OK and files not being in root can be accesed... Strange...

[MikeMcC]

UNDER WINDOWS, YOU CAN SET CACHED WRITES ON OR OFF. WHILE ON, SITUATION IS AS YOU DESCRIBED - WATCH OUT FOR THE ACTIVYTY LED ON THE CF READER.
Can you tell me where this option is in Windows? I noticed earlier this week that the CF Reader was still receiving data after the copying dialog box had closed - this was actually in Windows XP.

[tomas]

I don't know where it is in XP, but in ME it is under ControlPanel-System-Performance... But I can not recommend switching this OFF, becouse this setting applies to ALL drives, that means not only to the CF but also to HDDs. Windows speed goes rapidly down with write caching disabled...

[diem]

I've had a 'corrupt' message on a CF when I killed Opera while it was downloading. A soft reset cured this problem. I mention this only because you said that the CF worked fine in other Psion's.

[tomas]

worked on the same psion, which gives the "disk corrupt" message !!! I cannot see the root, canot go through directories, but I can launch apps that do not use root !

[MikeMcC]

Originally posted by tomas
I don't know where it is in XP, but in ME it is under ControlPanel-System-Performance... But I can not recommend switching this OFF, becouse this setting applies to ALL drives, that means not only to the CF but also to HDDs. Windows speed goes rapidly down with write caching disabled...
OK, thanks. I will leave the setting as it is :)

[nmbaker]

From what I mentioned earlier - working from home, I repeated my experience from Saturday, though let the LEDs finish flashing in the camera which were about three minutes after the apparent copy, then replaced the microdrive in the 7book and no problems. I am using standard windows format of the microdrive as I have a mixture of large and small files. I saw somewhere that Atelier didn't work on a seven so never pursued that software.

I tend to use either the camera native format or windows if I have problem - and it has tended to be from the Psion end. Since I keep backups over several versions, i'm not unduly bothered, as I can always restore in seconds if the need arises - luckily it doesn't often happen.

I am curious of a way to download copies of html files to Psion quickly without each file being copied or converted - is there an easy solution to this filetype as if so - how?

[Peter Walker]

Originally posted by nmbaker
I saw somewhere that Atelier didn't work on a seven so never pursued that software.

Yesterday, I had my first major crash on my new Netbook.

My only crime was to want to create a subdirectory in the Documents folder!

As soon as I pressed enter, I heard the three tones and the Netbook rebooted.

From that point on, the 512MB Toshiba CF card was no longer accessable in both my Netbook and my 5mxPRO.

After a lot of unsuccessful tries, I used chkdsk from EDU which reported several thousand :confused: corrupted FAT entries.
It took about an hour to fix the disk with the directory structure all gone!!

Luckily, my last full backup was only 2 days old and the files I had changed could be saved. My system is now working again and I hope that does not happen too often!!!

By the way, EDU works fine on the Netbook as far as I can tell. The only problems I saw is that there are no colours and that you have to run Chkdsk to fix a problem after formating!

Regards

Peter

[wanman]

I noticed that EDU worked with the Netbook aswell (although haven't tried formatting c yet, checkdisk & optimize definitely work). Will have to try it again when I install the 32mb upgrade DIMM, bet it struggles again then !!

Si

[Fred_R]

Back to the original question.
I have had CFs become 'corrupt' when I tried saving files to them directly from the PC, rather than doing a copy.
For example saving a M$ Word document as an RTF directly to CF rather than saving to the PC's directory then copying.
The CF was 'uncorrupted' by deleting the relevant file then doing file copy in the PC.
Saved the need to restore a 64Mb CF using old data.

Fred R

[wanman]

The times I have had problems with the CF cards are exactly as described by Fred. I struggled with the deletion though as the PC just didn't want to know about them and the Psion didn't recognise them and allowed deletion but they were still visable when you reinserted the CF into the PC again.

I used a free program called CleanIt to remove them although formatting always does the trick aswell !!

Si