Score:0

Kubuntu 20.04 -- USB microSD reader won't mount

cn flag

I have a microSD (8 GB) that I use for transferring gcode files from my computer to my Ender 3 3D printer. Yesterday, I found I couldn't mount this device (via an unpowered USB hub).

The SD card still reads when directly mounted in the micro-SD socket on the Ender 3, and the card and mini-reader combination mounted and read on my partners Mac (a 2015 iMac with current OS), so I presume this isn't failed flash RAM in the microSD or a bad mini-reader; the USB hub lets me correctly mount and read an 8GB SD card in another reader, but that reader (which has slots for both formats of SD) also won't work to mount the microSD in question.

I'm led to the conclusion that there's a software problem on my desktop computer. I've restarted the machine a couple times without change. I found GParted can detect the microSD and appears to correctly report partition and unallocated sizes as well as used/free in the FAT32 partition, but the option to "Mount" is grayed out.

How can I restore the ability to mount this microSD so I can transfer files to and from it again?

System details: AMD FX8350, 16 GB RAM, known good machine USB ports (except USB3 ports on the back don't work, I understand this is a known issue with Ubuntu 20.04), nVidia GTx750 (1 GB), 250 GB SSD primary and 1 TB platter secondary drives.

I'm not at home at present, so can't post diagnostics now, but will be able to do so this evening and over the next few days.

cc flag
Maybe try running fsck on the card to fix any filesystem errors which might prevent mounting?
Zeiss Ikon avatar
cn flag
I'll try that tonight. I always forget, that requires an unmounted file system...
Zeiss Ikon avatar
cn flag
@ubfan1 I don't know MacOS well enough to be sure, but wouldn't that prevent the card from mounting on partner's Mac? Not going to count the Ender 3 for that, it's barely a computer at all...
cc flag
It's up to the driver to consider what's a fatal error. Some might be pickier than others. On a machine that can read the partition, dd it to disk, and see if that's loop mountable -- eliminates the hardware questions.
Zeiss Ikon avatar
cn flag
Pretty sure `dd` has a different name and command structure on MacOS ; that's BSD rather than Debian or even Red Hat.
Score:0
cn flag

Starting with the simple stuff, dosfsck -f /dev/sdc1. After clearing the "dirty bit" (indicating I might have pulled the card without "safely remove"), it returned a huge list of errors of various kinds, many of which seemed to indicate it was going to turn bits and pieces of one or more files into independent fragments; I declined to write the results and tried GParted instead, with the result that it threw an error during checking the partition and instead completely mangled the fat32 partition.

In the end, still in GParted, I deleted the partition that came from the Creality factory, created a fresh one (that didn't have several megabytes unallocated at either end), and that one works fine.

In other words: the partition was completely hosed, probably due to inadvertently disconnecting the card while still mounted. Fortunately, the Ender 3 documentation files on it were easily downloaded from the Creality site and all the stored gcode files were copies of ones still on my hard disk; the only losses were a couple "bonus" demo gcodes that came on the card and don't seem to be available from Creality.

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