Hi all,

I recently acquired a new N810 and have been running into this fairly inconvenient issue with my external memory card (8GB Patriot-branded microSD with miniSD adapter, in case you're wondering). Since I've been thus far unable to find anyone else with this problem (trust me, I searched ) I thought I'd pose my question here.

The problem first reared its head after I was trying out a shell script I put together--it's just meant to convert some music files and upload them to the tablet's external memory card via SCP. The first iteration of the problem was I would upload a file (say ~5 MB) and then try to open it in the default media player, at which point the tablet froze and rebooted ~10 seconds later. I didn't notice this problem if I left the tablet alone for a little while after uploading the file. In addition, if I checked right after the transfer finished, the file would appear in the file manager before the unit rebooted--but if I made it crash by trying to play it, the file disappeared from the memory card. (Perhaps this means there's a delayed write that's involved somehow?)

The next case where I had this problem was simply trying to transfer more than one file at a time--just to clarify, the workload in question is "convert, then transfer" one file at a time, so it doesn't really involve a continuous, uninterrupted stream of writes. In any event, after a few files transferred, the tablet again froze up and rebooted, and the last file that had appeared to transfer completely had vanished from the card (files that had been transferred earlier were still listed post-reboot).

In trying to debug this issue I also connected the tablet to my computer via USB, copied off all of the files from the external memory card, and reformatted it. This went well enough, but trying to copy the files back to the tablet caused the tablet to lock up and reboot after 7-11 MB had been transferred.

Obviously I'm a little worried that my unit may be defective. I did not flash the unit upon receiving it because it appears to have the most recent version of OS2008 that's available for download (5.2008.43-7). It's also possible the memory card is the root issue but I don't have an SDHC reader handy to put it through its paces, nor do I have another microSD card handy to try with the tablet. (For what it's worth, I managed to record 116 MB worth of video from my camera without any problem, so I'm more inclined to think that the tablet is to blame rather than the memory card.)

Finally, this information might be of some use:
If anyone has any ideas it'd be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

EDIT: It turns out I actually had a 64MB microSD around, and as far as I can tell copying files to it through the tablet doesn't cause any kind of problems at all. Seems I was too quick to count out the memory card; that said, any suggestions short of sending the card back?

Have you connected your N810 to a computer via USB while the problem card is in the tablet? Doing so will allow your N810 to act as a card reader, and you'll be able to chkdsk/dosfsck the card or simply back it up and reformat it.

Yes. Whenever I try to copy files over USB like that, the tablet locks up and reboots after copying about 10MB.

I've formatted the card (both on the tablet and on the computer). I checked things out with fsck too but it just fixed some issues that appeared related to incomplete writes, probably from the copies that never finished. Fixed those issues and trying to copy another file caused the tablet to crash.

I also got a hold of a SDHC card reader. Curiously it seems the video I recorded with the digital camera was corrupt and unplayable, but I had no problems copying some large (hundreds of MB) files to the card with no apparent corruption. (I tried a large .zip file and a large .wav file, both seemed fine.)