How to label an SD card without any additional hardware?!


danielm

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Mar 16, 2007
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So here I am, in the mountains ... and instead of a book, I took my Pandora with me for those cosy evenings before bedtime. Even better, I took my brand new 64 GB Samsung Pro SD card with me. But now I had to find out that the XFCEHR (SIC) desktop uses absolute paths for shortcuts, instead of relative paths to the 1st and 2nd SD card slot, and all my links point to my old (empty) SD card now. And here is my question: How to change the label of my SD cards without additional hardware (e.g. a Windows laptop!). Gparted did something weird to my old SD card label (renamed the card to 'Pandora2??'), so I can't use it. All file browsers only show labels but don't allow changing them (not even in root mode). XFCEYK also won't let me change anything. PS: to whoever thinks that this posting is too long and unstructured, this fu***d up forum is too fancy for my Android browser to handle all the JavaSript here .... and yes, this is a rant!
 
I know this does not help you but I label my sd cards..SD1 SD2 SD3..etc.. I read sometimes that people will create their cards so no one will have permission to be use them on any other Pandora especially when it comes to downloads or transferring data.

I am not certain if this is enitrely true and perhaps there are topics on this in the Pandora  archives.? 
 
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Yeah, I will also name them Pandora1 and 2 ... now that I know ... By the way, do other parts of the Pandora OS use absolute paths? (this was a little scary for me to discover)
 
I'm a long time Pandora user, I've never had the issues your seeing.. The label of the SD card should matter with the PND system..The links should move with any changes to the SD card path as they're automagically put on the desktop/menu and such.   Also you should be able to rename the label with gparted or windows without issues.. 

Also what is XFCEHR and XFCEYK? are you using the default OS? the default windows manager is xfce4..

Also PND system aside, absolute path of links isn't just a Pandora issue, it would be a general issue with how any *nix OS mounts removable storage.
 
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Thanks for the information, I wasn't aware of labels being important. The links on my desktop are probably pointing to the wrong label because I copied the content of my old SD card to the new one on my PC, and not the Pandora. But now things are completely messed up anyways. Looks like either the Pandora doesn't like my 64 GB card or exFat is not working well enough yet. Also, a Windows Laptop of a friend of mine was the only option to change the label of my cards. Quite dissappointing :-( And yes, I meant Xfce but I wasn't 100 % sure about the name. Therefore the Xfceusbfj (SIC) ... Well well, the Pandora is out of order until I get home again ...
 
uh, I am not sure I understand... have you written custom links, and custom scripts?

if the PND itself has absolutepaths in it, just trash it's appdata/my_pnd folder...

if will make new links, when next run...

if it is an emulator or something where you had to stock the appdata/my_pnd/roms folder...

move it first, and then replace it.

hope this helps. enjoy your mountains.

-DEJ
 
I don't use the Pandora's capability to make desktop links automatically. It's links I created myself that point to the wrong label. Not a big deal, now that I know about it. I'm only sad that sometimes 'the easiest things' cause huge problems and some of them are impossible to solve without external help from another machine. This is very frustrating and I am already tired from such problems from Maemo and now Android. As I sad, no problem except that I have to be pacient ...
 
Oh, and the mountains are great! So everything's fine and there's actually nothing to complain about :)
 
Sorry, I don't know of an included exFat relabel program, but I suspect you can do it in a few minutes with a hex editor like wxHex and some internet research.
 
Command is exfatlabel it's included in the exfat tools... but not sure if it's built on the Pandora.. best bet is just to rename it in windows or a Linux box with those utilities on it.
 
exfatlabel is actually installed on my Pandora :)

But now I am home again. And after a shitload of "corrupted filenames" and "extremely slow copying", I installed the comunity codec pack and formatted my SD card to NTFS. Seems to work well so far, and I have my desktop links back.

I still think that these kind of things should never happen on the Pandora, but thanks for the quick replies and the help you gave!
 
I still think that these kind of things should never happen on the Pandora, but thanks for the quick replies and the help you gave!
these things should never be done on the pandora.
You mean we should stick to 32 GB cards and shut the f**k up?

Or should I not have tried out an "experimental" file system like the established exFAT? (As I said, the card is working now, but only because I am using another "experimental" file system)
 
I suspect it was more meant along the lines of 'the Pandora allows you to do anything you want, but don't expect it to hold your hands while you shoot yourself in the foot'.


Just consider how amazing it is that the Pandora even supports this proprietary MS crap.


Doesn't it provide the excitement of several roller coaster rides to you? Free of charge:)
 
I suspect it was more meant along the lines of 'the Pandora allows you to do anything you want, but don't expect it to hold your hands while you shoot yourself in the foot'.


Just consider how amazing it is that the Pandora even supports this proprietary MS crap.


Doesn't it provide the excitement of several roller coaster rides to you? Free of charge:)
I think I actually got that.

And I don't mind the occasional pain I feel in my feet, as long as I am still able to walk. What I dislike is aiming a gun at my feet and then having it explode in my hands ;-)

Well, ext2/3 performed about as badly as exFAT (file name corruption when file names contain non-standard characters like öäßøå). My next choice was ext4, but I had to find out that there is no write access for ext4 under Windows. This is a deal breaker for me! (please don't question my freedom of choice ...)

NTFS seems to work like a charm and I am happy that I finally got my expensive SD card to work. Looks like I have to get used to SD cards being as problematic as the Univeral [sic] Serial Bus ...
 
Yes. I know what it feels like. The file name encoding problem is real, though not really caused by the Pandora (but it could be smarter about it, see below). It is a legacy from the time when every system just used it's local encoding without caring whether this actually matches the data and most formats didn't even have the option of actually marking the encoding in use.


This is especially awkward on removable media and I suspect mostly surprises theusers in countries where ISO-LATIN variants were typical, because everybody else did have major encoding problems all the time:) This has been mitigated already by more and more consistent use of UTF-8 and will be over when things are migrated to actually record and honor the encoding. AFAICS this has mostly happened with some old but widely used file systems being an annoying exception.


I think there was a thread here (or a ticket on the tracker?) about being able to configure the mount options to better fit the individual media. Following up on this would probably make quite a lot of users happy including me, since it didn't yet annoy me enough to do anything about it:)
 
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