SD Card Issue: Failed Copy Over Network, Now Can't Write to It

barleysinger

Member
Jun 12, 2013
2
0
My wife has this machine :

Model : MID-756
Manufacturer : corelink
7 inch Allwinner A20 dual core and dual camera tablet pc with HDMI output
OS version 4.2

http://www.corelinkcn.com/show_file/en/product/read.asp?id=895


I *THINK* that is the correct one. Pretty sure. I searched via duckduckgo.com for a droid with a perfect match on the model number & all the right specifications, down to the specs on the two cameras and the fact that this droid has an internal and an external SD card (both of which can be upgraded - the internal card goes up to at least 16GB, and are sold with that much internal SD card storage in them by the manufacturer at a higher price. The Internal SD shows as a totally different drive then the flash memory.)

All was well with it but it only came without an SD card, and we only had one laying around - a 2GB SD card (which sucks). It was however a "name brand" card and it came with our LG droid phone.

So we got a 32GB SD card off of ebay (at an auction).

First off (and probably unrelated) the card had to be reformatted after becoming unreadable due to my wife taking the SD card out of the droid, without first unmounting it (oops) & that action somehow managed to get the FAT table (or some other part of the 32GB SD cards storage information) screwed up. Utterly screwed to unreadable. Bricked the card. So off to reformat it...

After finally managing to reformat it SUCCESSFULLY - and she eventually gave in and did this the long way by hooking it up to her laptop. using the droid as a drive, and then using the Manager program (where you can see all the disks) to low level format the thing to FAT32. This took a while (you could read a book while waiting (ZZZzzz...) you could read the entire bloody book) but it worked quite well after this.

Initially.

The (generic) SD card was working fine.

She then used the wifi to transfer files off of the network to the SD card, to fill it with her copy of the OLD 2GB SD card which she keeps on the network as a backup.

This worked OK...for a while...it was being populated with the desired data.

But while copying files (via wifi) somehow this simple copy operation screwed up in the middle of one of the files!:eek:
It died.:mad:
All from a simple wifi file transfer on the network.:confused:

We have never had that problem with any device before. We have a very solid network in the house. We are both IT professionals (or were until disability made us mostly retire early, aside form the occasion bit of work via the web). We are not "tech idiots".

so ... now the SD card cannot be written to at all.
the message is : failed to copy the file "FILENAME"

The data on the SD card *can* be accessed and read just fine. She has been playing MP3s that are on it at the moment.

However, no *MORE* files will copy to the SD card. It gets that error message every time. We tried unmounting and remounting. We tried shutting it down totally and rebooting. No dice (not 6 or 20 sided).

ALSO -> we can tell that some of the files are obviously corrupted. How do we know? The album cover for the Beatles "REVOLVER" has some interesting issues in parts of the image. It is rather...er...fascinating, as it changes as you move down from the top of the image, from the original full detail black and white, to less detail black and white, fading out to nearly complete white and *THEN* into MINT GREEN (nothing made by The Beatles was ever supposed to be mint green). An interesting and somewhat abstract version of the actual cover art now appears while it is playing. Could be kind of neat, but it is *not* the "real deal" anymore.

So it seems we must reformat the thing again (and wait a few hours for the job to finish)...and copy all the data over again.

She had no problems at all with a lot of regular writing to the DROID when it had a different name brand card in it - a name brand one that came with our LG phone. A 2GB Micro SD card is just tiny and sad but AGAIN it is a NAME BRAND CARD.

I suspect the new card is just a piece of crap.:mad:

When we have reformatted it I am going to try it out in our CAMERA first, and see how it likes the thing. If it barfs in the camera too, then will know what is up.

Any other ideas?
 
Last edited:

SEMIJim

Senior Member
Aug 20, 2011
359
23
First of all: Buying an SD card off eBay is a gamble. There are lots of counterfeits out there, these days. Personally, tho it's not necessarily a guarantee, I buy only name brand memory cards, and only from established retailers.

Secondly: Using your Android (or whatever) device as, essentially, a card reader is non-optimal, IMO. Too much "crap on the buss," as an ex-boss of mine would say. Recommendation: Get a card reader.

As for card readers: Best not to mess-about with that, either. I bought an inexpensive card reader off a reputable eBay seller. It was a great card reader, but, as I later discovered, not such a great card writer. In fact: It sucked at writing.

This USB 3.0 Five Slot Card Reader - CF/ SD/ MS/ xD/ microSD & M2 at Monoprice, however, worked like a champ for me. (A colleague of mine, just yesterday, came to me with "Do you have a card reader? The cheap one I've been using keeps screwing up." I loaned him one of those and it worked perfectly for him.)

Jim
 

vampirefo.

Senior Member
Developer
Nov 8, 2011
3,836
1,394
Most likely a bad sdcard, to format it should have only taken a few minutes, 32 Gb formatted by my Linux, I might be able to drink a coke before it would be done.
 

SEMIJim

Senior Member
Aug 20, 2011
359
23
FWIW: I plugged the card reader I mentioned above into my computer at home, which, in the past has had problems writing to both my Vizio VTAB1008 and my cheap eBay card reader, and wrote about 250MB of files to both a 2GB SD card and a 1GB XD card, verifying the copies with md5sum, no problem.

Jim
 
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