Second SD slot malfunctioning?


jontheramer2

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Joined
Oct 13, 2012
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44
In the first SD slot I have my 32 gb card which contains all software I installed; it has been working perfectly since the beginning; no errors and it's fast enough for me. In slot 2 I have some games and emulator images etc on another 16 gb card which has some IO errors which make some games unreadable. 

Now I usually use the pandora in server rooms and on the road as my linux machine for performing most tasks I need to perform. I bought a bunch of cards from China (actually because I needed mini sd convertors and it was cheaper to buy them with micro cards included) and all of them, after fdisk/mkfs give I/O errors on *other* computers but not on the pandora. There it says all is fine, even after fsck etc. But on other computers they are virtually unreadable and contain 1000s of errors. 

I first thought it was cheap cards, but now I believe it's the 2nd slot. To test that, I took two identical cards, formatted / mkfs 1 in slot 1 and the other in slot 2. Both work fine on the Pandora, no errors and everything on them is readable. But the one from slot 2 doesn't work properly on other computers. It seems readable , but if i run something like find . on the directory structure on it, it starts dmesg'ing IO errors. Card 1 is fine. I swapped the cards and did the same thing; same thing happened; errors on card 2, none of card 1. 

So another test; I created a new card on my ubuntu desktop, put on a file structure and put it in the pandora slot 2 ; everything is fine. Now on the pandora, I delete the directory structure and put a new one on (no format/fdisk, just rm -fR + cp -R). All is fine on the pandora, no errors, random files read fine. On the ubuntu machine it starts spitting errors again. 

What do I do to diagnose this issue? It quite a weird issue to me? 
 
Buy a decent USB SD card reader, try it with both your pandora and your ubuntu box to see if its a software issue.
 
Does this happen both in mass storage or when inserting/ejecting cards per slot?

Or both ways?
 
Last edited:
Hi,

my Pandora also have developed a problem reading card in the second slot since two weeks ago. It can no longer read any cards on the second slot. It does sees that I insert something but does not detect the card (Sd2 light flashes a bit). If I insist in trying to mount the card with the command line, the light goes on solid and if I try afterward to suspend, it will hang and need to reset (power + pandora button).

I did try using the card I usually have in slot 1 (which works there) but no luck on slot 2.

Any things that could be tried to fix this?
 
are you using an updated pandora? I think I'm remembering that older firmware revision could issue that kind of error when transfering data between cards... can someone confirm?
 
Tried to reflash with 1.54 and it still does not work. Does not seem software related.
 
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