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I am trying to install Voyage Linux on a 4GB compact flash card according to these steps. However it always fails at some point.

When I format the disk manually (as opposed to using the provided script) I sometimes get stuck at the mkfs.ext2 command with the message

Had trouble writing out superblocks.

Sometimes mkfs works but then tune2fs fails with:

tune2fs: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdb1

Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.

In that case I can sometimes run fsck -y until it finds no more errors, after which tun2fs will work.

But then it will fail while copying the system files to the disk. (I don't have the exact error message at the moment but it went something like "rsync input/output error (5)").

I tried using the dd command to check the card's integrity as suggested in this post. Reading works but writing zeros to the device fails with

dd: writing '/dev/sdb': Input/output error

Im doing all of this on Linux Mint 14 in a Virtualbox on Windows 8 (both 64 bit) and I am using an external USB card reader (Transcend TS-RDF8K). I can format the card to FAT32 and write on it in Windows with no problems. I also ran the Check Flash program on it, which found no problems.

Is my card broken and do I just need to buy a new one or is there anything else I could try first?

Community
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legr3c
  • 521

2 Answers2

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See if you have badblocks. If I understand correctly, there is no date to care about now on this flash card so you can do destructive test with badblocks. Don't worry. It will NOT destroy your flash card (it shouldn't!)> it will however destroy data on this flash card.

badblocks -wvs /dev/flshacard

Of course your dd test was similar... It looks like something is not right. You could try different (USB?) flash card reader.

Chris
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Solved: Attached the card reader to a USB 3.0 port instead of a 2.0 port and everything suddenly worked like a charm.

I had to do the installation from the Live CD instead of virtualbox though, since the device does not appear in virtualbox when using the USB 3 port.

legr3c
  • 521