Hi,
My N810 is only 3 or 4 months old now, but I've been having trouble with it. I don't have any internal or external memory. I have an 16GB (and also tried with an 8GB) memory card installed, and it's not seen. THe internal memory isn't recognised either though, which is really confusing me.

I read the thread about the internal memory corruption, but that shouldn't apply here, as it's not misreading the size of the drive, it's not seeing it at all apparntly.

If anyone could shed some light on this, I'd really appreciate it


Thanks all

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I reflashed the N810 and still no luck - straight reflash, didn't load any backups.


- jcbray

Some problems may result in it being recognized but not browsable in the file manager, or accessible as storage. For example, if they had somehow become unformatted, you wouldn't be able to use them, but that wouldn't imply any deep-rooted problem. Try running
in the terminal, and see if it shows any results. This lists (with wildcard *'s) any MMC/SD devices recognized by the device. Let us know, and we can go from there. Also, if you can tell us what you were doing immediately prior to this problem (e.g. installing apps, tweaking settings, etc.), then if it's not a hardware problem, that might give us some information to go on. Does your SD card work in a reader on another computer?

Thanks for the reply

ls /dev/mmc* shows three listings -

/dev/mmcblk0
/dev/mmcblk0p1
/dev/mmcblk1

I imagine a formatting problem could have been an issue for the internal one - but the external ones should be fine...

The card worked fine in my digital camera, so it definitly works - formatting could be an issue for that though then, no idea what the camera formats to.

I don't know when this happened, I didn't have any files stored on there at the time that i miss, so don't know if anything in particular screwed it up.

I'm not sure what's up with the external card, given that other devices can use it fine, however, weird things happen. (e.g. someone at my uni had a 2GB card for their phone, and it only appeared as 1GB, until I did a proper format with my N810.) My advice would be to try formatting them again, completely. For that, you'll need these packages: dosfstools and cfdisk. I'm afraid I don't have time at the moment to explain how to use them in detail, but what you want to do is use cfdisk like so:
and afterwards repeat for mmcblk1. Then delete all partitions of /dev/mmcblk0 and /dev/mmcblk1, then recreate a single partition on each, with the type set to FAT32 (I think it calls it Win95 FAT32, or some such), then select the write option. After that, run the , and repeat for mmcblk1p1. Note, both cfdisk and mkfs need to be run as root.
If you need more info, Google should be helpful, and I'll see what I can do when I have more time.
Cheers

I have those programs installed now, but don't seem to be working.

cfdisk /dev/mmcblk0

after entering that, i get no visual cue that anything is happening, or ocmpleted, unless it takes more then 15 minutes for anything to happen, it does nothing.

fdisk -l /dev/mmcblk0 also just drops to blank line after pressing enter, showing no details

penguinbaits console-tools GUI also doesn't help with looking at the partition scheme, just get a blank blue screen

- starting to think my N810's a little f'd up.

Thanks for your help mate, if you can think of anything else, or perhaps point out something i'm doing wrong, i'd really appreciate it.

This looks good. Cards get detected so at most it is badly formatted card or something like that (i.e. software issue, not hardware).

Not sure how the default permissions are set up but try this as root, not ordinary user.

Also try to remove the card, insert it again and after few seconds run 'dmesg' (no need to be root) and see the end of the log. There should be part about detecting the card and possible errors.

Sorry for the delayed responses, I've been busy with work. dmesg shows some EAC errors between removing and adding the external drive.

"EAC mode: play enabled, rec enabled
EAC mode: play disabled, rec disabled"

there is a number of these, the last one being an enabled line. There are numbers to the left of these lines, xxx.xxxxxx Looks to be progressive for all of dmesg, if it's relevant, let me know and i'll post them.

fdisk does fail to work in the normal privleges settings, but the above description, of the tools showing nothing, seemingly frozen (although I can minimise and move around the tablet without lag) was as root.

I tried formatting the card in windows as FAT32 - windows claims it was successful,. but still not recognised by the N810.

Not that I'm too knowledgable about these things, but it sounds more like whatever recognises hardware is failing, whether that's a kernel module or something else I wouldn't have a clue though.

both drives are 'external' in a sense - the 'internal' one is just a soldered on flash drive in addition to the central flash drive isn't it?


Anyways, if anyone has any insight, I'd really appreciate it - not opposed to flashing my device or anything, i've done that and there's nothing imortant on there.

Yes, that's why you should always see
or at least /dev/mmcblk0 if internal MMC card is unformatted for some reason.

However for the real mini/microSD card in external slot you should not see /dev/mmcblk1 at all if the card is not detected. If yoy really see /dev/mmcblk1 there, the card is detected so at least the hardware part works. Also dmesg should show some line related to mmc few seconds after you insert the card. you can also run
to see only mmc related lines. Card detection in log looks like
and if there are any partitions there should be something like

Also try to boot without the card and then insert it when system is already booted and see the log if it makes difference.