SD card suddenly read-only

[Emanoil Kotsev]

--- On Wed, 10/15/08, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: SD card suddenly read-only
> To: deloptes at yahoo.com, "Kubuntu Help and User Discussions" <kubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>
> Date: Wednesday, October 15, 2008, 10:24 AM
> 2008/10/15 Emanoil Kotsev <deloptes at yahoo.com>:
> >> Thanks. I've found that Windows machines are
> picky
> >> about USB storage
> >> formated on Linux, especially when using UTF-8
> filenames.
> >>
> >
> > I don't remember that FAT has UTF support. There
> for you specify it as mount option. The formatting has
> nothing to do with it.
> >
> > Correct me if I'm wrong.
> >
> 
> That may be the problem, then. Hebrew Windows computers
> format the
> disk in such a way that I can move files with Hebrew
> filenames safely
> between systems. Linux does not.
> 

Linux does if you tell it to. Read the vfat portion of 'man mount'

[cite]
(Note:  fat is not a separate filesystem, but a common part of the msdos, umsdos and vfat filesystems.)

...

       codepage=value
              Sets  the  codepage  for  converting  to  shortname  characters  on FAT and VFAT filesystems. By
              default, codepage 437 is used.

...
       conv=b[inary] / conv=t[ext] / conv=a[uto]
              The fat file system can perform CRLF<-->NL (MS-DOS text format to UNIX text  format)  conversion
              in the kernel. The following conversion modes are available:

              binary no translation is performed.  This is the default.

              text   CRLF<-->NL translation is performed on all files.

              auto   CRLF<-->NL  translation  is  performed on all files that don’t have a "well-known binary"
                     extension. The list of known extensions can be found at the  beginning  of  fs/fat/misc.c
                     (as of 2.0, the list is: exe, com, bin, app, sys, drv, ovl, ovr, obj, lib, dll, pif, arc,
                     zip, lha, lzh, zoo, tar, z, arj, tz, taz, tzp, tpz, gz, tgz, deb, gif, bmp, tif, gl, jpg,
                     pcx, tfm, vf, gf, pk, pxl, dvi).

              Programs  that do computed lseeks won’t like in-kernel text conversion.  Several people have had
              their data ruined by this translation. Beware!

              For file systems mounted in binary mode, a conversion tool (fromdos/todos) is available.
...

iocharset=value
              Character set to use for converting between 8 bit characters and 16 bit Unicode characters.  The
              default is iso8859-1.  Long filenames are stored on disk in Unicode format.
[cite]

It is obvious that for hebrew the defaulted codepage and iocharset are not correct.

Windows is the owner of the fat/vfat (fat32) filesystem, so they do it more elegantly ... but you have there only the msdos or ntfs filesystems as an option - this makes it a bit easier for them and for you.
Linux supports a dozen of filesystems .... so it's a bit more complicated when the system has to know what to do with a drive when mounted.

I am not that experienced in the field to tell you how to configure automount, but there is a way to let the system recognize your drive and mount with options suitable for it.

since Linux supports ntfs write I prefer using this for portable drives as the fs is more mature and safe, when it comes to recover data.

In your case I assume your hendheld can do only fat/vfat, so no choice. Just make the correct entry in your fstab file for this drive and I hope it will work forever

regards