vB Easy Archive - Help, My Treo eats 2GB SD cards for lunch!

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Help, My Treo eats 2GB SD cards for lunch!
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Posted by: chedlin

I ordered a memory card the week after christmas and it failed the first time I inserted it into my Treo. I just got a replacement, and now I just blew out my second SD card. I got my shiny new 150x 2GB Transcend SD card in the mail yesterday afternoon. I put it in my laptop which has a built in SD card reader. I copied over about 150MB of mp3s and then inserted it into my phone. I fired up real player and started playing music. Everything worked.

Well, I wanted to poke around and when and looked at the SD card info, and it showed a 1.8 GB card with 1.8GB free. I stoppped real player, let the phone shut off the screen and sit for a few minutes, and removed the card. I placed it back in my laptop, and it prompted that the card wasn't formated. This is exactly what happened before. Neither the Treo nor the laptop can format the card at this point and will return a media error.

I have used a 256MB Sandisk SD card (Just the standard type) without issue. I even was able to use the same card since the first 2GB card failed.

Any ideas on what I may be doing wrong? The Treo 650 is listed on the compatitiblity list on the Transcend website. I returned the last one through the retailer. Do you think my Treo could be defective?

Thank you for any help.

Posted by: cjmedina

sorry double post

Posted by: cjmedina

no alot of people have problems with 2gig cards i personally use a 1 gig pqi card

Posted by: Aaron's i285

Yeah, I heard about some guy who shelled out something like 250 for a 4GB sd card! and guess what!?!? the device he was using only read 2 gb of it. if this happens for anything, its the OS, and that fact that the OS was developed when such cards were not out yet.

BTW, the 1.8 GB is because MFGs measure 1 MB as 1000kb, and not 1042kb.
so do the math.

Posted by: chedlin

My understanding is that the Treo is speced by Palm to support 2GB cards, and this makes sense because it supports FAT16. Before I bought this card I was hoping to install a fat32 driver and use a 4GB card, but I found nobody had gotten them to work.

When I mentioned the 1.8GB earlier, the 1.8 itself wasn't my concern. It was that the total space and free space both read 1.8, even though I had been listening to the mp3s I had just placed on the card. At first I dismissed it as a rounding error, but having over 100MB ov mp3s should have dropped it by 0.1. I have been in the computer industry a long time and know how the storage manufactures use 10^9 as the definition of a gigabyte while software uses 2^30.

I have read about many success reports with a 2GB card so I want to stick with it. Should I try to switch brands of cards when I do the return, downgrade to a 1GB card (very reluctantly. I am hoping for a large kmaps cache, plenty of video room, and room for plenty of mp3s), or what? I am inclined to try and get Cingular to replace the unit, but it doesn't blow out the 256MB card.

After the card fails, I can't format it in the phone or my laptop. If I try and format it fat16 from the windows command prompt I get a track 0 bad error. Even if I had a 4GB card, I should be able to format it at the lower capacity and use it (as I do the 4GB microdrive in my digital camera).

In summary, the card is physically damaged after I use it in my Treo. Its possible I got 2 defective cards, but I think unlikely (The apear to have shipped from different warehouses). Should I get the Treo replaced, or try switching brands of cards? To recap, the card is a Transcend 2GB 150x card. I guess I should see how close the serial numbers are. I am afraid I won't be able to get the exchange the 2nd time around.

Thanks,
Charlie

Posted by: chedlin

Its just the transcend cards. Aparently I am not the only one with this problem.

More shipping lost, but I am getting a refund.

Posted by: Aaron's i285

thats really weird!
i mean, Im totally at a loss for ideas.