flash drive reporting wrong size, how to fix?

[Ian Malone]

On 15 January 2012 22:23, Pete Travis <lists at petetravis.com> wrote:
> On Jan 15, 2012 2:17 PM, "Ian Malone" <ibmalone at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 15 January 2012 19:59, Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:
>> > On 01/15/2012 11:45 AM, Ian Malone wrote:

>> >>
>> >> The only reason I
>> >> haven't got a new one yet is 2GB ones are hard to find these days.
>> >
>> >
>> > Can you borrow another card (any size) and see if either Linux or
>> > Windows
>> > can deal with it?  If so, it's the card.  If not it's probably a
>> > hardware
>> > issue because having both versions of the software fail in the exact
>> > same
>> > way is Highly Unlikely.
>> >
>>
>> Oh yes, other ones work, I'm just interested to see if I can find out
>> what's happened to it, also I don't have spares to hand for what I
>> need it for. This 48MB thing in particular is taunting me, if there
>> was *nothing* showing up then I could move on with my life.
>>

> As part of your experiment, you should dd an image of the card and examine
> it with testdisk and photorec.

Thanks for the suggestion, obviously this only works on the machine
that sees a 48MB device (via USB I get this instead: dd: opening
`/dev/sdc': No medium found). Haven't used photorec or testdisk
before, but they fail to find anything (partition, filesystem, files).
On closer inspection of the image it appears to be a repeating
512bytes block, appears fairly random and I haven't tried to make any
sense of it. I suspect that any solution to getting access to >48MB is
going to involve ioctls (i.e. not block access), but this repeating
block thing suggests that it's actually a quirk of the reader I'm
seeing and not any contents of the flash card itself.

-- 
imalone