LinuxQuestions.org

LinuxQuestions.org (/questions/)
-   General (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/general-10/)
-   -   I screwed up a 4gb mmc card (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/general-10/i-screwed-up-a-4gb-mmc-card-549128/)

acid_kewpie 04-26-2007 04:58 AM

I screwed up a 4gb mmc card
 
hi,

i bought myself one of these... http://www.mobymemory.com/proddetail.asp?prod=TS4GBMMC4 the other week, 4gb MMCplus card for my phone. and somehow, i *think* via fdisk i recreated a default partition table on it, which changed the reported geometry of the card. i can't remember the original specs but it now lists it as a 1014mb card, 1015 cylinders of 1mb each. i can put a partition on it and format it (ends up at about 970mb), but can't copy any data to it at all, which doesn't really seem that suprising.

anyone have any ideas how i may be able to revert the geometry to something legitimate? is this somehow related to the fact that it's a MMCplus card not a standard MMC one... would using a presumably MMC only card reader introduce an issue like this? i assume it wouldn't as standard, but i (apparently) made other simpler mistakes like trying to format the card on the phone itself (nokia 6230i) which is a big no no it seems, and went downhill from there...

any clues guys? xp fixes more than welcome too if they exist...

Nathanael 04-26-2007 06:19 AM

well - if all else fails, you could buy a 2nd one, dd an image from that and dd it back to your one, and send the new card back within the 2 weeks allowes :-)

acid_kewpie 04-26-2007 06:45 AM

interesting... that surely wouldn't be able to actually change the geometry would it? obviously this geometry data is stored somewhere on the device, as i've managed to change it though...

Crito 04-26-2007 07:22 AM

Are you sure the phone can handle a 4gb card? I had to upgrade my Palm T5 to go past 2gb as I recall, and before that if I tried to format a larger card in it same thing would happen. Pretty sure I used dd to blow away the first 512 bytes, then just formated it normally in Linux -- it was a regular CF card though, not MMC (plus or otherwsie), so not 100% sure same would work for you.

Nathanael 04-26-2007 07:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by acid_kewpie
interesting... that surely wouldn't be able to actually change the geometry would it? obviously this geometry data is stored somewhere on the device, as i've managed to change it though...


i did that with a 1GB cf card i once screwed up

coolb 04-26-2007 07:38 AM

send it back, say there was some *werid* problem with it :)

syg00 04-26-2007 07:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by acid_kewpie
interesting... that surely wouldn't be able to actually change the geometry would it? obviously this geometry data is stored somewhere on the device, as i've managed to change it though...

First sector.

acid_kewpie 04-26-2007 07:58 AM

yeah well £16 from amazon market place doesn't seem like it's really worth bothering with...

acid_kewpie 04-26-2007 07:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by syg00
First sector.

yeah that occurred to me as i typed really...

Nathanael 04-26-2007 08:38 AM

you could dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda (or whatever your mmc card occurres as)
and the do a simple format

some cards are not all that happy with them being partitioned :-{

acid_kewpie 04-26-2007 08:45 AM

no no change, tried that a few times, the card itself is still reported as 1gb by fdisk. i thought i might hav ebeen able to get somewhere using sfdisk as you can aritificially lie to it about what the sector sizes and cyliners are but that'll create a partition of an illegal size, but the device still reports as 1gb throughout..

brainiac 04-26-2007 09:26 AM

A guy on another forum said the 6230i and the 4gig MMC cards want to be in a FAT16 format. Don't know if it's true or not. Good luck.

acid_kewpie 04-26-2007 09:50 AM

yeah i think my problems originally started when i tried to format it as fat32... either way my problems have dropped way way down the stack, nowhere near being able to care about the filesystem in question.

Chromezero 04-26-2007 10:08 AM

If you have access to a FreeBSD system, you could use the disklabel command. I'm not aware of a Linux command that would do a similar function. Using disklabel you can change the geometry of the disk, or at least what it thinks it is. Check out disklabel for more info on the command.

syg00 04-26-2007 04:53 PM

My 4 Gig USBkey (note, not MMC) shows;
993 Cylinders, 128 heads, 63 sectors/track

If you're in the mood to play, maybe try that.
As always, all care no responsibility ... :p


All times are GMT -5. The time now is 10:32 AM.