SDHC Card Fun

Hi Folks,

I have had my A110 for a week or two now and have applied all the usual fixes - advanced desktop, skype, compiz-manager, 1GB ram, etc but have problems with my 16gb SDHC card. I have it in the left slot and if I reboot on the standard desktop all is fine. If I reboot on the advanced (standard XFCE) desktop it is missing. I can see it with a fdisk -l but I get no icon on the desktop and file manager does not show the space. I can then swap back to the standard desktop, reboot, swap back to advanced and my disk is back again! What gives?

Any ideas welcome.

ps. If I boot with my Huawei E220 3G dongle in I can connect using wvdial but my network icon dissapears from the taskbar and my disk vanishes.....another problem for anotherday!

Neil

 

Check where the volume manager is mounting the card (if anywhere). That is, after boot start the file manager and look in /media. Also check for /dev/mmcblk* to see what's been detected and assigned a driver.

I have a nasty suspicion that there is a start-up race between the two drive slots, if they are both plugged in. You don't always get the same mmcblN device assigned to the same device. So I suspect that the _right_ slot is getting /media/disk, which is where Thunar expects the left slot to be.

I've got around this by putting specific entries in fstab for the two slots, forcing the left slot to mount on /media/disk and the right slot on (say) /media/right_slot. So far this seems to be working OK. But I should point out that I've completely disabled all the storage expansion gubbins, so I don't know what other changes I may have made that might have a hand in fixing the problem.

 

First for NeilB, I have run into exactly the same problem and have not found a fix. I suspected that an entry in fstab would be the fix, but have not pursued it thus far.

For Kevin -- could you please post what changes you made to fstab? I'd like to give this a try since I really like the standard xfce desktop better, but for now have gone back to the Acer desktop because of the behavior of the SD card (which for me is exactly as NeilB describes, and there is nothing in /dev/media). I'm not sure what to call the left slot in order to set up the fstab entry.

Thanx!

 

run `blkid' when there are no cards plugged in. Then plug a card into one slot and run blkid again. The difference between the two runs will give you the id of the slot device. Then do the same with the other card.

Then in /etc/fstab, rather than starting the line with `/dev/something', for the left slot start it with

UUID=xxx /media/disk .... rest of the line as usual

where the xxx is the output from blkid. /media/disk has to be created manually for this to work.

I should point out that I have completely disabled the storage expansion stuff on my AA1, so what works for me may not work for other folks. In particular, you may need to experiment with whether you need the `noauto' flag in fstab, to prevent the card getting mounted at boot. I have `noauto' in my setup.

Personally, I would disable _all_ auto-mounting of drives, including USB drives, if I could. But it breaks too many other things on the desktop, so we just have to work around its oddities.

 

Interesting. It appears that something in the startup files for the standard Linpus Lite desktop is responsible for overlaying the expanded memory in the proper place.

 

Storage Manager. Soft responsible for extending storage space under Linux...

 

/etc/aufs.act, which is referenced from one of the dbus init scripts (can't remember where, since I've deleted all this stuff). aufs.act loads the posix overlay and links the card to the union filesystem on /mnt/home.

 

Somewhere, in an AAO specs, I've read that Storage Spansion slot acept only 8 GB...

 

Officially yes. But it is not truth as AA1 takes 32GB cards as well...

 

Thanks. Got this page bookmarked so I can come back to it. It would be nice if loading the overlay could be made optional and the user could chose the device/file to use. Kind of like what Puppy Linux, and, I'm sure, others do.

 

Many AAO users mount the SDHC card on /home (as I do), eliminating the confusing aufs filesystem. There's an extra bonus if you are prone to installing a variety of Linuxen on your One, which is that all of your user files (on /home) are retained. When you go from distriution to distrubution, all of your personal files and settings go with you.

Perry
www.kidpub.com

 

I don't put my home directory on a card, because I can't be sure that I'll never want to use the machine without the card, or replace it with a larger card. I've created symlinks from /home/user to the card, so all the dot-something directories stay on the internal disk.

 

Kevin and others --

Thanks for the help but "no dice" here. blkid reports the same results regardless of whether an SD card in plugged in or not:

Code:

[user@localhost ~]$ blkid
/dev/sda1: LABEL="linpus" UUID="626c2835-4aab-41a0-b1e0-a8ad9b843aa9" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3" 
/dev/sda6: LABEL="linpusold" UUID="66f9acad-5422-4064-a071-8188459c444e" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3" 
/dev/sda7: LABEL="linpusold" UUID="f5f2e970-d6ed-44b1-bd0e-00db0ea6831d" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3" 

Not sure what to try next. I like the idea of disabling aufs and maybe just mounting the left SD slot as /home. Would appreciate if someone would post info on how to do this. I'm not exactly a Linux n00b, but I've never tried messing with mount points and I'm not clear on how to do this safely.

 

I do hope that my AOA110-1722 will recognize my 16GB SDHC card by Transcend.

 

That's really weird. On my AA1, blkid shows entries for /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2 (swap), /dev/mmblk0 (one card), /dev/mmblock1 (the other card, whole disk), and /dev/mmblock1p1 (the partition).

Do you have the same model as me (8Gb SSD) ?

If you want to mount the left slot as home, I think you need to get the UUID business sorted out, as I don't think there another way to mount that won't break Thunar.

 

Don't see why not -- that's the card I have.

 

Sorry folks, all a bit immaterial to me now! I was copying video files from my sons usb disk to my usb disk via the AA1 and it went into power saver mode. This screwed the file system on my usb disk and since then my touchpad freezes after boot. I tried fsck after I booted from a Fedora 8 usbstick but that didn't work so I have just rebuilt my machine back to new install.

As it happens it has fixed my network problem and sdhc card problem......so I probably won't be running automatic updater!

If it works.....don't fix it.

I may also be more selective in the hacks I apply from now on.........

 

Kevin --

Thanks for the quick reply. Yep, I have the 8GB SSD version (blue). Well, this is an interesting little problem that I will have to work on a bit. I think I will try booting from my Ubuntu USB drive (8.04) and poke around a bit for starters and see if anything looks weird. Not sure what to make of this /dev/sda6 and /dev/sda7 business! Guess it is time for me to learn more about mount points, fstab, fdisk, mount, etc.

UUUnicorn -- You should have no trouble. My AAO/1 recognizes my 4GB SDHC card just fine. The problem we are discussing now relates to trying to switch from the Acer desktop to the xfce desktop -- that's when I hit the strange behavior.

Part of the fun of Linux is working through these little issues -- with the help of the community, thank goodness!!!

 

That's really, really weird. I can only imagine that the Linux implementation has changed a bit over time, but I'm surprised that yours is that different from mine. I also have the 8Gb blue -- I bought it new about two weeks ago.

Rather oddly, the EEE (as I understand it) has it's card slots on some sort of internal USB bus, and they do indeed show up as /dev/sdXXX.

I wonder if there have been some _hardware_ changes to these units? That might account for the very different accounts I hear about the reliability of the SD slots.

 

OK, thanks to some additional discussion from Kevin I think I have this thing working, at least somewhat. For those tuning in late, the problem is getting the OS to recognize the left SD card slot after switching to the standard xfce desktop (NOT Acer desktop) as discussed in the following thread:

viewtopic.php?f=31&t=2665

Anyway, as discussed in the current thread (SD Card Fun), I was not able to identify the UUID of the SD card slot using Linpus, so I booted into Ubuntu 8.04.1 using a USB drive that I have set up for that purpose. Issuing a blkid command in Ubuntu gave me UUID="3031-3036" type="vfat".

I used this information to modify /etc/fstab per Kevin's posting above.

Then in a terminal I created the directory /media/disk

Code:

cd media
sudo mkdir disk

Finally, I rebooted.

The SD card is now mounted at /media/disk. Opening Thunar and navigating to /media, I was able to right-click on disk and select Send to > Desktop (create link). Now I have quick access to the SD card from a desktop icon.

If I want to save a file to the SD card from an application it takes a bit of navigation to get there, but I can live with that.

I haven't tried doing anything with the right side slot yet, but I imagine the process would be the same except for calling it /media/disk-1.

Any thoughts???