[JAM, MDA Compact, S100 General] vowless:
Guys,

I've had this problem for ages now with my Imate Jam. I suffered the card corruption on a 512mb Integral card and a 1Gb PQI card.

The thing is, I thought it was the Jam, but in my case.....and I suspect a lot of other cases, it's not the Jam but the card.

The reason why I say this is that I have been keeping a fresh backup of the 1gb card on a portable HD drive. When things got corrupted, I would just format the card in the Jam and then copy everything back using Activesync. But this was slow.

So then I put the card into the SD slot on my laptop and formatted it there and then copied stuff over, it was at this point that several times I got errors about writing to the card. So I would format the card using FAT and retry, everything would copy and seem OK, but if I ran a CHKDSK on the card it had errors. I tried this using FAT32 as well (as some people have said that this could be the problem) but still I can get the same errors.

I have tried other card readers, 3 in fact, and each time if I format the card using the laptop, or in fact any laptop using any of the card readers then copy over the data (which is 900Mb) then once completed, running a chkdsk will always show up errors, which need to be corrected using the CHKDSK /F command. Unfortunately, repairing the errors is a waste of time because you simply get a folder called FOUNDXXX on the card with a bunch of files inside, typically 10,000 files !!! all the same size as the default cluster size of the card format (16k or 4k depending on which format). And, unfortunately, at that point, you don't know what files were corrupted and moved to the FOUND folder.

So, the only way that I have managed to successfully copied my 900mb to the 1gb card is bit by bit, taking 7 or 8 folders and copying those over, then another 8 etc etc This will always work, and each time I copy over a bunch of folders/files I then run a CHKDSK on the card and it all seems fine. Eventually, I have copied over everything and then I do a final CHKDSK and the card is OK. I can then put this in the Jam and everything works OK...

The problems seem to be related to the FAT table within the card, or how the FAT table is updated.

What I have noticed in the Jam is that I can get errors to occur if I install and App on the card that has a lot of folders/files. If I install an App that only has say, 1 or two folders and then a bunch of files within, I can successfully install and there is nothing wrong (I use storage tools to check the card). But, installing an App with loads of stuff, pretty much guarantee's card corruption, the same as if I copy of loads of files/folders using the laptops.

So for now, I write protect the card, carry around the 512mb with most of my stuff on as a backup and try to limit what I install. If I need to install something else, I often install on another card, then copy the folder off onto the laptop then onto the 1gb card and then put that card in the Jam. Not elegant, but it works.....

I am going to try and get hold of another 1gb card sometime to see if that suffers from writing a large number of files/folders to it. Because, like I said, I can get the cards to fail in the laptop, let alone the Jam..... Also, I'm going to do some more digging around because it seems that this corruption of large SD cards is quite common, just doing a search on google for "1Gb SD corruption" returns a lot of stuff....!

If anyone knows more...would welcome any advice.....

Cheers.