[bookport] Re: FILESYSTEM MUSINGS
- From: "LARRY SKUTCHAN" <lskutchan@xxxxxxx>
- To: <bookport@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 12:11:34 -0400
I'm not sure of this at all, or we would be looking into it much more
agressively. I use the device daily and I honestly don't remember the
last time I ever had to format a card.
There are some things that can corrupt the file system. Removing the
card before the double-beep is probably the number one place for
possible trouble in this area.
Of course, a firmware crash could possibly cause corruction, too, but I
think we've got the crashes down to a non-event now, as well.
Removing the card or the Book Port from the PC before all the caches
are flushed can cause problems, too, but if one suspects this to be a
problem, we recommend using the safely remove hardware icon in the
system tray. Under XP, this does not seem to be an issue.
>>> buhrow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Tuesday, October 25, 2005 11:49:50 AM
>>>
Hello. I've been reading this list for a couple of months, and
have
noticed what seems to be a somewhat common thread which appears to
match my
experience, and which, if it's true, raises issues which I think should
be
addressed in order to make the user experience for the bookport an
even
happier one.
From what I can tell, there are a number of users who purchase
their
bookports from APH, get them home, load them up with data, read from
them,
and are completely happy with them. Then, after a month or two of
use,
when books have been cycled through the unit, and the user is feeling
more
comfortable putting more and more on the Bookport, he begins
experiencing
difficulties when transfering data to the Bookport. Flash cards fill
unexpectedly during transfers, users encounter file coruption during
the
reading process, or weird errors just happen, seemingly from no
where.
the advice on this list, generally, seems to be that flash cards
get
corrupted, and they either have gone bad, or need to be reformatted
before
they work again for another month or two.
My experience coincides with this description. I have had my
Bookport
for about four months, and have had to reformat the flash card I use
most
often at least once. It's now been about six weeks since I last
reformatted my flash card, and I'm now beginning to see anomolous
behavior,
which I suspect will go away if I reformat my card yet again.
All of this is to say that I think there is a subttle filesystem
bug
in the Bookport which no one yet quite understands. On clean, i.e.
newly
formatted flash cards, things work well. Then, as material comes and
goes
from the filesystem on the flash card, some of it written by the host
computer, some by the Bookport itself, the filesystem becomes "dirty"
in
the way that most filesystems become "dirty" over time. Directories
become
fragmented as items are deleted and inserted, disk block allocations
become
fragmented as well, and the efficiency of the filesystem on the flash
card
becomes less over time. All of this is normal, and should be
expected.
The rub is that the Bookport appears to not deal well with this loss
of
efficiency, and as a consequence, becomes very fickle in its operation
as
the filesystems on its flash cards age.
While, as someone suggested, running defragmentation programs
against
the filesystems on one's flash cards for Bookport might aleviate the
problem, I'm not convinced this will totally help because I don't
think
defragmentation programs zero out blocks they free up on the
filesystems
they fix. The behavior I observe with my bookport leads me to believe
that
the firmware makes certain assumptions about what is in its various
file
buffers, and reuses them without necessarily properly cleaning them.
For
example, I have an MP3 file on my bookport right now which reads fine,
except if I query the percentage status while the file is playing, and
I've
read more than 50% of it. If I hit the 8 key when the latter half of
the
file is playing, I get an FS buffer panic, followed by a bunch of
audio
file read error messages, accompanied by choppy sound until I either
stop
the bookport, or it comes to the end of the file in question.
Let me stress, though, that I'm not trying to suggest that I
know what
the problem is, or how to fix it. However, I believe there is a
problem,
and that it should be looked into. The bookport should be able to
deal
with filesystems which pass chkdsk or scandisk, but which aren't
necessarily pristine in terms of not having been used, and users
shouldn't
have to regularly reformat their flash cards in order to preserve
usability.
I love my bookport, but this issue, what ever it is, certainly
adds to
my level of frustration using it, and makes it downright inconvenient
at
times, while I cajole it into working.
-Brian
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