Right, my 2c on what is certainly the VERY WORST THING about the N800.

I'm on latest firmware with a Transcend 8GB Class 6 which suffered the same fate others have described. The device now just sees a corrupt or unformatted card. XP via USB sees it as a 500kb FAT drive, which may be because I tried letting Windows format it with the only settings it would allow.

I don't have any other devices to try this card in, it being SDHC and my camera being old. The optimist in me hopes that the card may still be recoverable (please, any new tips? i've played with fsck.vfat, fdisk, panasonic formatter, and got nowhere).

Today bug 1204 on Maemo has been updated by Nokia with a very ambiguous section on "permanently damaged cards", which seems to acknowledge that they have now managed to destroy a few themselves, but they think that:

a) many others who think they're destroyed probably just have corrupt tables. IF this is the case, how about explaining to the many people here claiming unusable cards what magic repair procedure we're not trying?

b) that there is no evidence that these aren't just one-off faulty cards. How about the several people that have had +1 corrupt cards? A few posts up somebody mentions 4!

I feel sorry for Ethercircuit above because he's taken exactly the approach I did - bought a nice Transcend card, assumed it wouldn't happen to him, particularly when it worked fine for a while. Seriously, unless you can afford to lose it, remove it and hope this gets resolved. These cards aren't nearly cheap enough to be this easily destroyed, and having installed the new firmware supporting SDHC isn't any reason to be complacent - almost all experiences so far point to this being where the fault lies.

Perhaps i'm being a bit too vocal for somebody relatively new to the forum, but frankly I see no reason not to be. I bought this thing in part for increased capacity and i'm now too scared to put more than about 625MB in there. SDHC support was claimed - was it too much to assume it would be reliable?