Debian size and uSD

[Alastair Johnson]

Jeffrey Ratcliffe wrote:
> I bought myself a 4Gb uSD card and decided to have a go at moving the
> (full) 512Mb partition onto it, using
> 
> http://inferno.slug.org/cgi-bin/wiki?Drive_Backup_And_Cloning
> 
> as my reference. I backed up the 512Mb with no problem. The 4Gb card
> was not recognised, though; dmesg on the desktop produced:
> 
> [ 2460.876027] usb 5-8: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and
> address 10
> [ 2461.010393] sd 5:0:0:0: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery
> [ 2461.010444] sd 5:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
> [ 2461.010462] sd 5:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
> [ 2461.010471] sd 5:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
> [ 2461.010477] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] READ CAPACITY failed
> [ 2461.010482] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT
> driverbyte=DRIVER_OK,SUGGEST_OK
> [ 2461.010489] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense not available.
> [ 2461.010496] sd 5:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
> [ 2461.010502] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
> [ 2461.010505] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
> [ 2461.010508] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
> [ 2461.010643] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
> [ 2461.010808] sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
> [ 2461.019731] sd 5:0:0:1: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk
> [ 2461.020480] sd 5:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
> [ 2461.035667] sd 5:0:0:2: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk
> [ 2461.036236] sd 5:0:0:2: Attached scsi generic sg5 type 0
> [ 2461.045093] sd 5:0:0:3: [sde] Attached SCSI removable disk
> [ 2461.045602] sd 5:0:0:3: Attached scsi generic sg6 type 0
> 
> OK, I thought, I'll install Debian from scratch, but this failed with:
> 
> ext2fs_mkdir: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short
> read while creating root dir
> 
> Subsequent attempts fail with:
> 
> dd: writing '/dev/mmcblk0': Input/output error
> 1+0 records in
> 0+0 records out
> 
> What can I try before I give up and send the card back?

I had this problem with a Kingston 4GB card. There was a kernel patch a 
couple of weeks ago that seemed to solve this, although given the 
intermittent nature of the problem I may just have been unusually lucky. 
I've been using other cards since so can't give a longer term test 
report. It's in Andy's stable tree, but last I heard it was only in the 
unstable OM feed. I don't know which patch set Debian uses.