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?

Thanks for the good post. I have been sitting on the fence so far but finding it hard to hold out in the face of the amazing developments from UKMP, Kagu and the upcoming Canola. I just don’t have any cards of sufficient capacity to try them out.

It is heartening to hear that Nokia are investigating and maybe replicating our experiences. This being so, it is equally disappointing that not much progress is being made.

I have a couple of sdhc cards on order and wish there was more that could be done apart from crossing my fingers.

Is there any evidence that the Kernel update makes a difference to reliability?

OK I give in, I can’t hold back any longer, just got to try out Kagu and UKMP.

Today I took delivery of a SanDisk 4gb micro sdhc card. The reason for buying was that I got a good price. It comes with both an ‘Micro to SD’ adapter (similar to the ‘Mini to SD’ one that Nokia provide) and a SanDisk MicroMate USB SDHC adapter – my laptop inbuilt card reader doesn’t recognise SDHC.

Using the SanDisk MicroMate I have copied across all of Navicore’s Europe maps, loads of pdf manuals, hundreds of photos, scores of ebooks and so on and I still have 1.5GB free. Tonight I shall start filling that up with music.

I left the default file system intact, didn’t format the card, and it is now in the Internal Memory Card slot and so far is functioning fine.

I just hope that Nokia gets around to the promised kernel fix release before the gremlins get to it.

Two observations: i) How do they fit 4gb on such a tiny card and ii) the SanDisk MicroMate adapter is just a little on the wide side. It leaves sufficient room for a cable plug in the adjacent USB slot but not enough for a second MicroMate or a USB TV stick.

In the next few days I hope to take delivery of an 8gb Integral SDHC with their adapter.

This is really bad. My 2GB SD card gave me an error about being full when I tried to save a route from MM. I check it and apparently it thinks the card can only hold 500 MB. WTF!!!??

I've had it, I'll be putting this card into my Kodak camera and putting the 1GB card I originally had in the N800 back. This issue really needs to be fixed.

sondjata were you using the card in the internal or external sd slot?

I had corruption problem w/ the stock kernel of the latest n800 firmware. Then I upgraded to the high-speed SD\mmc kernel (forgot the version number), after that I haven't seen any problems with mmc\SD any longer. The read performance also more than doubled.

Tested with 2GB Patriot and 8GB class-6 Kingston SDHC.

external slot

I had the same experience or so I thought, but when I try untar large files it corrupts the filesystem. It is much more stable than the stock.

I am trying to see if I can get my 8GB kingston SD class 6 to work but it seems unreliable no matter what I do. It ate my 2GB kingston (mmcmobile), and I was able to delete the partition in win XP and recreate a fat32 which now appears to be reliably storing data. Its not going back into my

I guess I will RMA on Monday

i had almost the same problems as recyclebin described. my N800 fried totally three 8Gb Transcend cards for now. first was class 2 that after installing the latest firmware in some time threw all my data to read-only, then it completely corrupted next class 6 card after a 1 week of usage (with multiple FAT corruptions during that week), and now it burned my new 8Gb Transcend after 2(!!!) hours of use. i must say this entire situation is disguisting and drives me mad. it is completely unacceplable to release a firmware that does such hardware(!) crashes almost like a famous WinChih virus to expensive electronic devices.

Nokia SHOULD do something as fast as possible!

what i am wondering is what kind of b@st@rd1zed code did they use?

think about this - the kernel patch for the previous firmware, released by a community member and not nokia, ran on hundreds on n800s without botching a single sdhc card.

nokia seems to be cooking/burning up sdhc cards by the dozens. did they not even look at the code written by the community member who provided it?