[scorey]

After using them in Tangara, I've had two completely different SD cards became unreadable by any device that I have.

I started with a 2GB Eastbull SD card. Never heard of the brand before, I just needed a 2GB card so ordered the first one I found. Loaded some ogg files on it to try out Tangara, but Tangara didn't recognize the card. Investigated further and saw that the card was formatted FAT16. I reformatted FAT32, copied the ogg files again and Tangara seemed to work fine.

Started up Tangara companion and updated to firmware 1.3.1. Still seemed fine with wired headphones. Did some fiddling around with bluetooth and connected to AirPods Pro. Tried to connect to my car's bluetooth and never succeeded. I had tried removing the AirPods from the Tangara device list, as well as my car. I don't remember all the details, but at this point my list of 'Known Devices' on Tangara is one blank line followed by 'Subaru BT' which is my car. I thought it odd that the list of 'Known Devices' includes a blank line.

Now I wanted more storage than 2 GB. I have a SanDisk Extreme Pro 64 GB mini SD card that was in a Raspberry PI. I put it in an SD Adapter and put that in my laptop's SD card reader. Used Rufus 4.7 to format it FAT32. Copied over ogg files and tried it out. One of the tracks was '(02) Má Vlast- Vltava (The Moldau).ogg' and when it was displayed in Tangara it showed a ☐ in place of the á. That was the second odd thing I noticed. I assumed that the á just wasn't in the character set but is there anything else to watch out for with regards to character encodings?

I don't remember the exact series of events that I did next. Somewhere along the line Tangara started rebooting repeatedly. With the 2GB card it would reboot, then show a normal screen for a few seconds (like with the battery icon and 'Albums by Artist' etc.), then reboot again. That repeated until I slid down the side switch. With the 64 GB mini sd card in the adapter, it would get into the reboot loop without even showing a normal screen. Just reboot, reboot, reboot...

I tried putting them back in the laptop and using Rufus again to reformat but now they aren't recognized at all. If I try them in Tangara, I just get 'SD Card is not inserted or could not be opened'. I tried putting the 64GB card in a camera I have to try to use the camera to format it but it wasn't recognized.

As far as I can tell, the two cards are bricked. Is there any way to use Tangara to do any diagnostics on them? Or even un-brick them? I don't care about the data but I would like to know what happened and avoid doing that in the future.

[ailurux]

It seems like something caused a boot loop, and it might have corrupted the drive due to repeatedly mounting the drive and crashing. I've had the occasional drive become corrupted when encountering crashes debugging the firmware, I've always been able to recover them by reformatting though.

Because you mentioned Rufus, which seems to be Windows software, I'm assuming you're using Windows. You shouldn't need Rufus to format the drive afaik, Windows can format drives with the inbuilt disk management tool, which would also be the first place I'd check to see if the drives appear there and are able to be reformatted from there. To use this tool you can use the Win+R (run) shortcut and type in `diskmgmt.msc` and hit "Ok". If they're not there, try removing the drive and plugging it back in again, and double check the card reader (I recently spent ages trying to read a card I thought was broken and it turned out the reader was broken).

You might also want to try formatting as ExFAT, rather than FAT32. Both are supported, but you might find you have better luck with one or the other.

Hope this helps!

[scorey]

I went with FAT32 since I have other devices that don't like ExFAT. It's a hassle getting larger cards to format FAT32, that's why I went with Rufus. Right now the problem is that the cards aren't recognized period. I've tried under my Windows machines, Linux machines, embedded devices, and one MacOS machine, all different readers. They don't show up. They are no more. They have ceased to be, bereft of life, they rest in peace. Perhaps they are ex-SD-cards, but I hope they can be resurrected.

It's been a while since I've done any ESP32 development (going on 8 years now, I think) but I was going to try getting in there and reading any SD status directly to see what's there--or isn't there. Right now the only SD reader I have that I can poke around with like that is in Tangara. Do you have any tips for that?

[Be]

I went with FAT32 since I have other devices that don't like ExFAT. It's a hassle getting larger cards to format FAT32, that's why I went with Rufus. Right now the problem is that the cards aren't recognized period. I've tried under my Windows machines, Linux machines, embedded devices, and one MacOS machine, all different readers. They don't show up. They are no more. They have ceased to be, bereft of life, they rest in peace. Perhaps they are ex-SD-cards, but I hope they can be resurrected.

It's been a while since I've done any ESP32 development (going on 8 years now, I think) but I was going to try getting in there and reading any SD status directly to see what's there--or isn't there. Right now the only SD reader I have that I can poke around with like that is in Tangara. Do you have any tips for that?

You'd likely need to dive into esp_driver_sdspi for that because file reading is abstracted behind the C library file reading functions. There are some logs in esP-driver_sdspi you can enable, but when I tried enabling them, the logging slowed down the Tangara enough on its own to cause problems.

Alternatively you can try the Rust firmware I started which so far all it does is read a file from the SD card in a loop.

[dageek247]

As far as I can tell, the two cards are bricked. Is there any way to use Tangara to do any diagnostics on them? Or even un-brick them? I don't care about the data but I would like to know what happened and avoid doing that in the future.

I had this happen. I managed to resolve it by formatting the drive with a new partition table in gparted.

[scorey]

I had this happen. I managed to resolve it by formatting the drive with a new partition table in gparted.

The problem I have is that nothing recognizes the cards. I can't format with a new partition table in gparted, because gparted doesn't see any card. Nothing sees these two cards, not on Windows Linux MacOS. Not different card readers. Other cards I have are seen fine. I could use gparted with those if I wanted. But for these two cards that I used in Tangara, they are essentially non-existent. They are merely plastic wafers devoid of any useful features. I'm not sure how else to explain that no software tools can be used on these cards since any software tools require their underlying system to recognize the card's existence. I have not found any hardware out of all that I've tried (see above for the approaches I've taken) that actually reports that these two cards do exist. I'm still trying to set up a toolchain to poke at them at a hardware level to investigate.