[Eee Pad Transformer Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] qtcaroline22:
Hi,

I've been lurking and searching for a while here on the forums and have been Googling for solutions to my problem as well. I have Debian Kit (can't post URLs as of now so you'll have to Google it) set up on my TF101, because I needed the GNU Toolkit as Busybox is lacking and I'm doing some LaTeX editing on the command line as well. I've actually successfully set up Debian Kit in the past, though I just resorted to installing everything in a ~2GB loopdisk file inside my internal storage. I've recently recovered my TF101 from a soft brick and when I was setting up Debian Kit again I thought of installing it on an external microSD instead since 2GB seems a little too small for my needs.

So I partitioned a 16GB microSD as follows: I created a 12GB ext3 partition (this is where Debian will go) and the rest as a FAT32 partition (I never thought of using around 16GB for a small Debian install residing inside Android anyway).

I set up Debian, but I noticed that everytime the tablet went to sleep, either automatically or through my intervention, all the inactive USB storages and external SD cards get unmounted by the tablet. Since my ROM (ARHD, which is based off the stock ASUS ROM) only "natively" recognizes FAT32 and NTFS partitions, my ~4GB FAT32 partition was affected by the annoying auto-umount/remount. However, I noticed that whenever it does, my 12GB partition appears to be affected as well, and for some reason I couldn't find my Debian install anymore (partition seems to be missing), though a reboot fixes the problem.

I got tired of this so I repartitioned the microSD such that its entirety will be formatted as an ext3 partition. I installed Debian again and now I noted that whenever my tablet goes to sleep the ext3 partition no longer gets unmounted.

The problem is not solved however. After an unspecified and probably random period of time in inactivity, the block partition of the external SD where Debian is installed somehow "renames" itself into the next available label for it in /dev/block. I can't clearly describe it through words without using too many paragraphs so here's a couple of outputs (I can't post screenshots because of the 10-post rule):

During normal usage (block device of the external SD card is boxed):

me@android: /dev/block $ ls
*
*
*
mmcblk0 <- this is my internal storage
mmcblk0p1
*
*
*
mmcblk0p7
mmcblk1 <- my external microSD
mmcblk1p1 <- the 16GB ext3 partition
*
*
*

And here's an ls of /dev/block when Debian suddenly goes MIA:

me@android: /dev/block $ ls
*
*
*
mmcblk0 <- this is my internal storage
mmcblk0p1
*
*
*
mmcblk0p7
mmcblk2 <- my external microSD
mmcblk2p1 <- the 16GB ext3 partition
*
*
*

Whenever my microSD goes by another block device Debian goes haywire (it's now just running of my RAM), and even if I restart it, it doesn't fix the problem, so I have to reboot everytime this happens. It doesn't happen as frequently as it did before I repartitioned the microSD such that the entirety of it is now an ext3 partition, but it's still quite annoying to have to reboot every few hours or so.

I'm not exactly looking for a solution here, I'm just trying to find out what's going on so that I can look for the solution on my own. I'm hoping that this is just an annoying problem (ASUS actually calls them "features") with my ROM, and if that's true I'm just going to move to a ROM that isn't based off the stock ASUS ROMs.

Any help and insights would be appreciated.