For what it may be worth, which may not be much, I am an extremely heavy user of the Book Port and have used it since May 2004 and have never had to reformat a flash card. Now I know I have jinxed myself and will be doing it tomorrow. Joni ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Ring" <ring.richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <bookport@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2005 10:56 AM Subject: [bookport] Re: FILESYSTEM MUSINGS The only issue I would take with your assumption is this. I have had to reformat a card twice in the past two years. Why then, do I not experience these same problems that some (not all) Bookport users seem to report? If I did in fact have to reformat a CF card every six weeks, I would be quite unhappy, so if this is the behavior that the majority of Bookport users are experiencing, then the problem is a severe one. -----Original Message----- From: bookport-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bookport-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Brian Buhrow Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2005 10:50 AM To: bookport@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bookport] FILESYSTEM MUSINGS 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