I recently filed a bug #2073 in bugzilla about a problem where Windows can not complete diskcheck on N800 memory cards, when N800 is connected to the PC with USB cable. (The memory cards are shown as removable drives.)

The problem occurs when there is significant amount of individual files and/or folders in the card. I do not know exactly how many files are needed... but it has to be some tens of thousands. If you are using MaemoMapper and store your map tiles to the memory card you can easily get enough files to reproduce this bug.

The problem is seen like this: When you hook up the N800 to PC, the memory cards appear to Windows as removable drive. You can open them and explore the contents without problems. But, if you run checkdisk on them (right click the drive icon, select "properties", then "tools", and then click "Check errors" and select option "Automatically fix file system errors"), windows starts the disk check and after about 30 seconds the N800, if display was dimmed, display lights up and Windows report "unable to complete disk check". At the same time the removable disk drive is no longer seen having any files in them or seen having any free capacity. If I remove the USB cable and reconnect it, the drives become available again. This behavior is 100% reproducible on my "test environment".

This problem occurs in both of my N800 tablets and in both memory card slots. It also happens with both of my SDHC cards (4GB Sandisk and 8GB Patriot, both formatted with FAT32 having 2kB block size). The problem is there in current firmware as well as with earlier firmwares. The SDHC or MMC kernel patches did not make any difference on behavior.

Running the same diskcheck on the same cards using external SDHC USB reader completes the disk check without problems.

What I'm asking if anyone of you who use MaemoMapper (and have significant amount of map files stored on the memory card) can confirm this and report it to the bug report linked earlier in this post.

Or, if it works for you can you post details of your:
- memory card brand/size/type
- format type and block size
- amount of files and folders on card

Linux and Mac people too... maybe it is just a windows issue?

UPDATE: Running dosfsck on tablet itself appear to complete the disk check, and finds no errors/problems.

Bumb...

I was able to reproduce this error even with the Nokia supplied 128MB SD card...
It only needed some 600+ directories and 14000+ files.

Anyone else tried this?

(Is it just a bug with my Windows PC? I can try it with another computer sometimes... just to make sure.)

Just tried this on IBM T41 (Windows XP) laptop and exactly the same result...

If the card then becomes unavailable it sounds like it might be a bug with the gadget file-storage driver. Might be worth a kernel re-compile with CONFIG_USB_STORAGE_DEBUG set to see if there's any interesting output.

Simon

P.S. Any dmesg/syslog output?