2014-09-20 - case of a my SDHC

who is general failure and why is he reading my disk?!

that's probably one of the most common phrase/thought around the world, while ppl notice their hard drive begins ends its journey. ;) i had quite a few failed disk: I/O errors, performance collapse, CoDs, etc… this was not the case for an micro SDHC card i used in my phone. i often listen to music at work. i usually copy some from home and delete as a listen full albums, so that there is a sure rotation and nothing stays there for too long. one day i started to have this funny feeling that i have been listening to a particular album few days before. so i deleted it and moved on. and i got déjà vu the very next day – its back! zombie folder?

at first i suspected my phone to go nuts. restarting did not help. re-inserting card neither. finally i put a card into an USB card reader and started to play around: formatting, repartitioning, filling with a pre-defined data and re-reading them again… writing always succeeded. reading however revealed invalid md5s of files, though no error was reported by hardware! after a power cycle, card always revealed its at-the-time-of-failure content! i replaced card with a new one… and learned an interesting lesson, on how (non-)spectacular a failure can be. thinking about terabytes of data i have on different medias and possible errors that may randomly occur makes me dizzy. how ppl can live w/o backups?! ;)