50g freezes on SD card access

[JDW]

(01-04-2020 06:34 AM)tuxfish Wrote:  IMO fat16 format is a "must" with SDcards used in conjuction with an HP50g.
fat32 format is no good at all: at best the access time will be much slower, at worst the whole card will not work.

The capacity of the SDcard must not exceed 2GB.
In my experience SDcards with one GB work in most cases even better.
1 GB are officially supported by the HP 50g; 2GB might work.

The bus speed should be 12.5 or 25 MB/s.
UHS-I,-II, -III or express will not work (bus speed too high).

* delete lost.dir or any other file on the SDcard if you do not need the file anymore.
A corrupt file might also cause a "freeze".

In some cases a corrupted SDcard can be repaired with CHKDSK (win) or Disk Utility (MacOS) or better with the "SD Memory Card Formatter"

Thanks. I don't think bus speed is an issue because he tried an old 128MB card formatted as FAT16 and it still locked up his 50g. Here's exactly what he told me:

I tested with different sd cards. I got some borrowed cards, all of different sizes. I made sure about the file system the cards were using, and in some of them I removed the partition table and created a new partition with the FAT 16 and then FAT 32 file system. One of the cards was only 128MB and was partitioned by me with a FAT 16 file system. All these cards work correctly on my computer. I also tested one of these mobile memory cards and an adapter, and freezes just the same.

Based on the above, it appears the SD card is freshly formatted and doesn't seem like there are any files on his SD card. He seems to be able to use them on a PC just fine, so there's nothing wrong with the card itself.

The only thing that he has not tried is cleaning with alcohol, so I will advise him to do that, but I remain very skeptical that will be a fix here, especially since he did a visual inspection with a magnifying glass and all looked fine to him.

I will also have him try the PINIT command, but will that really fix a freeze like this?

Hmmm....