[raginar]

Huh. Yea, I can't reformat the disk. It lets me open it now, but it says it's partitioned with 8gigs free. But, neither of my macs can format it. Maybe I'll try it in XP in a little bit.

[frank]

I may have spoke too soon.

After a forced shutdown (machine wouldn't shutdown after two minutes', so I held the power button down for five seconds) and restart, the adata 16GB SDHC card came up "Unrecognized," and offered to format it. I didn't have any important data on it, so I just formatted it later with Disk Utility (FAT32). I'm running 10.5.6, thanks to 7.7.

I'd recommend not using the SD slot for "unique" data that doesn't exist anyplace else.

[Geoffkhall]

I had a similar problem. My adata 16gb went south along with my user account.... Note to self, don't change user account location to SD card.

Now I can't mount it, repair, partition or format.

I was able to use Disk Warrior to recover data but still unable to fix the issues.

Formatted guid w/ hfs partition.

My vista machine won't delete partitions on it because it s a portable device.

Not sure what to do now beside RMA.
Any ideas?

[melzbelz]

I have a Kingmax 4GB usb drive that corrupted while I was trying to create a Win7 boot install a few days ago. That was under WinXP. I can't format the drive on the mini9 or on 3 other PCs (Vista, Windows 7 and Win XP)

My 16GD SDHC is fine so far.

[listerfiend]

Another one bites the dust. Was working fine, now it cannot even be recognized in any reader/computer.

[chazzek]

I once bought a brand-new ADATA 8GB card and it died almost immediately when I repartitioned it in Linux. This was with the USB card reader it came with, too. I was able to exchange it, but I suspect ADATA may have some quality control problems.

[raginar]

Wow. Thats ridiculous how many of us have had issues with these cards. Newegg gave me a new one for free when I wrote about it, so make sure to complain if you have issues.

Good luck!

[notywtr]

gparted has worked for me where other tools fail. I use their live usb distribution, so you can boot from a usb with the tool. It's a linux tool, and is relatively easy to use. Also dangerous if you accidentally reformat the wrong drive!

http://gparted.sourceforge.net

[bmaltais]

Originally Posted by Zeke

I have a 16gb SDHC card, a Transcend brand one, also from Newegg. The exact same thing happened to me today on my Mini 9 running Type11 7.7. I couldn't repartition it in OSX, either in the built-in reader or in a usb reader. As a last shot I booted from a thumbdrive with ubuntu linux and it WAS able to partition and format the card. I rebooted back to OSX and formatted it GUID and all seems well now.

Last week the same thing happened to me on the SSD drive and I had to use the XP installer disks to partition it. Could it be that there is an issue with Type11 installs corrupting flash media in a way that OSX can't recover from or even repartition. I hope not, but if there are others out there seeing this please speak up so we can identify it.

Remember that our SDHC reader is using beta drivers. Don't expect perfection... I is actually pretty amazing that we have SDHC support... so expect some glitches. I personally neve had any issues with them.

[AlecEdworthy]

Originally Posted by bmaltais

Remember that our SDHC reader is using beta drivers. Don't expect perfection... I is actually pretty amazing that we have SDHC support... so expect some glitches. I personally neve had any issues with them.

I have an 8Gb SDHC card (purchased from and branded MyMemory.com) which I get corruption on. I erased it a couple of nights ago and put my files (17 m4a files around 8-10Mb each, one 1.7Gb m4v, one 140Mb ogv and six mp4 files around 850Mb each) back on from a known good source. I then produced MD5 sums of the files from the known good source and have since then generated the MD5 sums of the files from the 8Gb SDHC card five times. The first two times (which were fairly soon after putting the files onto the card and without sleeping or ejecting the card) the MD5 sums matched perfectly. After ejecting and reinserting the card two files (both were 850Mb mp4 files) had different MD5 sums. The following day one of the files had returned to normal but the other file was producing a different incorrect MD5 sum. Today the same file is producing the same incorrect MD5 sum. After ejecting and reinserting it I am back up to two files showing different MD5 sums, the same two as previously but different MD5 sums again. I have also noticed that I get occasional entries in my system.log along the lines of,

SDHCI: I/O timeout during SDMA transfer: Status: 0x0, Error: 0x0, Block: 15146607, Offset: 0, Blocks: 8

often followed by a message along the lines of,

SDHCI: retry succeeded

but sometimes followed by,

SDHCI: I/O error after command 18 (SDMA): Status: 0x8000, Error: 0x1

This is not a rant that I am getting corruption, this is to say I think I am getting corruption and I would love to be able to feedback into the community to help build a better driver (assuming it is the driver at fault and not the card, I don't think I have another SDHC card reader available to confirm it).

I am running the latest DellEFI (version 1.07.1) and if I can gather technical data, log output etc. please let me know what to do and I will gladly do it. I am comfortable installing beta/devel output enabled kexts and I am happy to erase/reformat/repartition the card in whatever way is necessary as the data that is currently on there is held elsewhere safely if any of this will assist in testing the card reader. I also have a 128Mb SD and 1Gb MMC Mobile (with MMC Mobile to MMC/SD adaptor) available for testing (but not currently tested on the Dell Mini 9).

For now, here is the output I get when inserting the card into the slot.

SDHCI: BaseClock = 50MHz
SDHCI: SD Clock = 390KHz
powerSD:  0x14832b2
SDHCI: initializing SD version 2.0 card
SDHCI: sending CMD55
SDHCI: sending ACMD41
SDHCI: sending CMD55
SDHCI: sending ACMD41
SDHCI: sending CMD55
SDHCI: sending ACMD41
SDHCI: sending CMD55
SDHCI: sending ACMD41
SDHCI: sending CMD55
SDHCI: sending ACMD41
SDHCI: sending CMD55
SDHCI: sending ACMD41
SDHCI: sending CMD55
SDHCI: sending ACMD41
SDHCI: sending CMD55
SDHCI: sending ACMD41
SDHCI: sending CMD55
SDHCI: sending ACMD41
SDHCI: got response to ACMD41: 0xc0ff8000
SDHCI: high capacity card
SDHCI: BaseClock = 50MHz
SDHCI: SD Clock = 25000KHz
SDHCI: RCA 0x00000002
SDHCI: Response: 0x00400E00 0x325B5900 0x003DAF7F 0x800A4000
SDHCI: Setting 4 bit mode
SDHCI: Response: 0x00400E00 0x325B5900 0x003DAF7F 0x00000920
SDHCI: Successfully switched to 4 bit mode
Card Init:  Host Control = 0x2
Card Init:  Host Control = 0x3

Many thanks, Alec