Re: [tlug] PC Card Slot memory suddenly unusable. "invalid blockdevice"

[Jim Tittsler <jwt-tlug@example.com>]

On 2005-08-18 09:42, David Riggs wrote:
> I absent mindedly ejected it yesterday without umount (had not used it 
> in 24 hours and thought it was not mounted). Now no matter what I do, 
> including rebooting, all I can get from it is "invalid block device". 
> Cannot even mkfs or fdisk on it.

Are there any useful clues being written to your syslog when you plug 
in the memory?
# tail -f /var/log/messages
(then plug in the memory)

Do you have an image backup of the device?  It sounds a bit like the 
information in the 0th block has been corrupted in some way.  Copying 
just the first block from the backup might help.

> Under WinXP the data is there, readable and writable.

(Does Window's fdisk still have the /mbr switch that repairs the 0th 
sector?  Can it be used on a drive that wasn't the boot drive?)

> Isn't there any way of recovering? Can it be that I cannot even format 
> this thing?

If you no longer need the data (and have no boot block backup and no 
card of identical size/partition scheme to restore from), I would try 
writing zeros to the first block and then fdisking it.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hde bs=512 count=1