Left-sideloaded SDHC loses partition table

I've got a 4G Patriot SDHC card that has been serving me well on my EeePC for a couple of months. It was partitioned and formatted as Ext2 with EeeXubuntu on it.

When I first got my AspireOne, I put the SDHC card in the left slot. I could see the directory structure and files, so I tried to boot onto it only to find that there seems to be no BIOS setting to do so. After booting back into Linpus, I noted that I couldn't see my existing data any more, but it now had folders called My Music, My Documents, My Pictures, etc.

Once I understood that this left slot is "special" in that it extends the existing storage, I figured that it must build these folders when you plug something in, stupidly trashing whatever you may have there. Bogus, but possibly by design.

Not long afterward, I found that I couldn't see anything on that SDHC any more. Dropping to terminal and using cfdisk /dev/mmcblk0 I could see that the partition table was lost. Being that I hadn't formatted it on this machine, I figured I needed to do that. I set it up as ext2 and it turned up, so I copied a bunch of music files to it.

Since that time I have installed Ubuntu 8.04.1 as per WanderingStar's instructions. I'm pretty happy with it with the exception of the mic that has yet to work.

I have had this SDHC card lose its partition table twice in the last couple of days, just out of the blue it does not turn up as a mounted device after boot and I check dmesg and cfdisk to find that it doesn't recognize the partition.

I will try formatting it again and putting it into the Right-hand slot to see if it has the same behaviour, but it's disconcerting.

Anyone with similar issues?

 

I've had a non SDHC (2GB) SD card in mine since I got it a few weeks ago and not had a problem. No new folders, no drama of any kind. Its formated FAT32, so perhaps that could be the issue.

Could it be that the card has started flaking out? In other words, Linpus reformating the flash drive caused those sectors to start to fail.

Just a thought - very strange at any rate. I'm curious if anyone else has had this as I am buying an 8gb card soon for this machine and don't want to loose anything, or my investment.

Jeff

 

I'll try it for a couple of days in the right side, then again in my Eee for a while.