[OSM-talk] Navi GPS SD card woe, any advice?

[Adam Bower]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2006 at 11:51:16AM +0100, Etienne wrote:

> >Hmmmn, GPS refuses to format the dane elec card, but after formatting it
> >in a windows box and putting it in the GPS it appears to work ok (i'm
> >going to take it out a couple of times later and see what happens).
> >
> >After formatting it in the video camera or the digicam it refuses to
> >even see the card. I'm starting to wonder if you need to get or tell it
> >to format with the right cluster size on cards for the navi gps, and if
> >the cluster size is not quite right it isn't happy? I seem to recall
> >seeing things in dmesg output on my linux box about invalid cluster
> >sizes when trying to read tracklogs off faulty cards in the past....
> 
> 
> Might be.  I seem to recall that one-time, after I did a firmware update to
> my NaviGPS, I had to reformat the SD card before it would work.  It is
> supposed to be FAT-16 but perhaps the NaviGPS is a bit fussy somehow.

Right, I think I /might/ have a solution. It turns out that my NaviGPS
is *incredibly* fussy. I've now got it (seemingly) working with all the
of the SD cards I own (including the 1GB kingston card that proclaims it
is 3.3V only that used to freeze the gps solid). The trick is to do a 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc (or wherever the raw device is for the card)

in Linux, then put the card into a windows box and format it which
creates 1 single partition on the raw device. Then putting the card in
the NaviGPS and it all "just works". I've not had enough time to test 
this to destruction but all the cards which caused weird things so far 
are now going into the gps and working fine (obviously I need to try 
this over several hours and see if the track logs come out ok). Trying
to format some of the SD cards in the NaviGPS renders them unusable by
the gps though (which is annoyingly weird as if they are formatted in a
machine running windows the gps uses them fine) but they work ok on my 
linux box and in Windows XP on the laptop after they get formatted by
the GPS. 

Anyhow, tomorrow is my "test stuff a bit more and see what happens"
experiment day, fortunately I've got to drive for a couple of hours for
an appointment so I should get some good data then. If anyone else wants
to try this on their non-working SD cards or has a decent explanation 
as to what is going on then I'd love to hear it!

Thanks
Adam
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