The Leewit Needs Your Help

[rolanni]

The Leewit is an Asus subcompact that weighs less than the book I'm reading at the moment. It has 1024 MB of memory and is running eee-PC 1.0 (which is based on the Linux flavor known as Xandros) on an Intel mobile processor. For ease of moving things between it and the desktop (still no wireless at the Confusion Factory; we're working on it, but it's 'waaaaay down the list and not moving up very fast due to the various necessary things that keep jumping line) -- anyhow. Because the Leewit has very little on-board memory, I bought it a 4-gig PNY SD card. The idea was to save everything I worked on to the card, then move the card to the desktop and download. Simple, easy, efficient.

Except. The desktop -- an HP Pavilion, call-name Altair, that I keep thinking of as "the new computer," though it's obviously not, since it's running XP version 2002 -- does not recognize something so heady and strange as a 4-gig card.

Now the Leewit, which can see and save to this card justfinethanks, informs me that it is looking at Partition One. Which gives rise to the notion that there Could Be a Partition Two and indeed a Partition Three, if I only knew how to partition SD cards in Linux. And! the thought further goes that, if the partitions are small enough and tasty, the desktop will be able to see them.

So, techie-types: Is the second assumption at all valid? And, if so, can someone walk me through the partitioning process?

Abundant Spanish Aunts.

Comments

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I can see a couple of things which might be problems.

The worst is that Altair might be physically incapable of handling the the large card (hardware incompatibility). This could be solved with an add-on USB card reader.

It might be a driver problem with Altair's card driver. Is there a later version of the driver?

It might also be a file system format incompatibility. Assuming that the Asus has a command line available (xterm or the like) do 'mount' and see what it reports as the card's type. FAT or VFAT should be fine for any sysem, but anything else is probably incompatible. However, that shouldn't prevent it from recognising the card. What does Windows Disk Manager say (Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Computer Management | Disk Management)? If the card is recognised at all then DM should at least show the partitions even if it can't understand what's on them.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Hmm, my initial paragraph disappeared.

The partition size shouldn't be a problem for XP. As long as it's using FAT32 not FAT16 (FAT16 maximum size is 2GB). Windows Disk Manager (see previous comment) should show that if the card is recognised at all. Or in Linux do "sfdisk -l" which should show all of te partitions on all drives. (Oh, note that to do any of the fdisk variants on Linux you need to be root.)

[sraun]

Given that she said 4GB SD, that means it's actually an SDHC card. I doubt the SDHC spec was even a gleam in someone's eye five years ago, let alone the couple of years before that that they were designing her Pavilion.

I'd recommend picking up an SDHC-capable USB card-reader - they can be had for $5-30, depending on how many other card formats you want them to read and how quickly you want it. IIRC, I got mine from an Amazon 3rd-party seller for about $7 including shipping, and it took less than a week to get to me.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the pointer. It's good to know that the fix is so affordable.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

The worst is that Altair might be physically incapable of handling the the large card (hardware incompatibility).

I think this is what we're looking at. When I try to access the card through Windows Explorer, I get a message that says the drive cannot be accessed because of an I/O device error.

When I try Disk Manager, it just freezes up, as if the sight of the shadow in the doorway is enough to unman it.