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

[Adam Bower]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2006 at 08:36:23PM +0100, Tom Chance wrote:

> On Thursday 21 September 2006 20:17, Adam Bower wrote:
> > 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".
> 
> That's promising :o) Any idea what Windows does that's so magical, for those 
> of us without any easy access to a Windows machine?

Right, further experimentation using just Linux has led me to discover a
couple of things. Just dd'ing from /dev/zero onto the raw card and then
formatting it in the navigps (the gps will complain bad card but will 
then format it) works on all my cards apart from one. Of course 
this was the card that I took out for test logging earlier today, that
after 30 minutes of logging the gps suddenly turned itself off and when
I got home I found that the contents of the card was just garbage.

YMMV but dd'ing /dev/zero directly on to the card and then formatting it
in the GPS seems to keep it happy enough. Give it a go and let me know
how you get on. It's going to take me some time to get through all of
the cards I have and test them to see what happens, to make things worse
it's just started raining as I was planning to go out cycling.

I'm not sure if there is any equivalent way of formatting the cards in
Windows though, I may look at this if I find that what I have done so
far helps out.

Adam
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