It could be a batch issue I suppose.
I now have 3 still with files, all files added between 2014 an 2020, differing on each of them. All with a different amount of fill and usage.
Somehow on two of them I now have no partition table, and gparted gives an error message when trying to create one.

I am still curious to know why they have failed. None of them have the "usbc" string scattered in the partition table, so it is not that, some Linux users have had failure upon either suspend or resume from suspend, but most of those saw the usbc string.

Well I dug around all the spare computer stuff around the house and discovered 11 other sd cards of various sizes that all work, I can add and delete files, I could reformat 2 of them (empty already).
I have these 5 with zombie file systems on them, all Samsung.
On the reading side I have the built in SD reader (it never used to stay working under windows), a usb3 Lexar SD reader, and a no name items that all work with the good cards,
The adaptors are a selection of Samsung, SanDisk and 2 PNY brand micro-SD adaptors. Two of them only work as read only, so have been marked as such.

The dmesg dump is quite large, how much of it is needed? last 20 lines? last 50 or 100?

I now have a handle on which bits of other kit seem to be functional, when it was 5 faulty and 1 good sd card I could not be sure where the fault lay.

It is definitely not write protected, when I flicked the switch on the side gparted correctly told me it was unable to write.

The bit I have a problem with is that gparted tells me it had success in deleting the partition, when it clearly didnt, if I unplug and then plug it in again, I can read the files straight away, no windows involved. Gparted ought to be looking deeper into whether the files are gone. I agree it was MS that started the mess with straying from the original standard. Since then the software ought to be able to look at both mbr tables as well as both partition tables and at least warn you in advance that things are not straightforward.

I have successfully used gparted quite a lot at home and at work, but this batch of sd cards is giving me problems, it might have been the cheap no-name card reader I had at the time of creating them? it could be the usb funnies that people have noted with the string usbc plastered into the mbr and partition tables.

Hi Altoid,

There are many many cases on the web of this ame issue occurring on Linux systems, I tried winows again merely because Devuan was saying yep, the wipe succeeeded, but gparted was lying to me, the partition was NOT wiped. It is not clear if it is the OS or caused by bad hardware,
Trouble is the hardware is all respectable brands.

I am going to spend a few days looking into the MBR and see if that is borked, then manually repair them, it seems winows and linux are both flaky at doing this right always.

I am finally getting a few steps forward, I have 6 microsd's all done at about the same time, formatted on the same windows PC.

Several of them now seem to have many issues on them. I think the safest thing to do would be just to start afresh, there were differences in the copies of the FAT and partition tables that crept in somewhere along the way,

No I did not reboot after running dd, is that an issue for a removable disk? I took it out, waited a bit then plugged it in again, is that not enough?

I also asked gparted to read the devices again, it still came up with the Fat32 partition.

I will try those after supper that is now imminent.

The device in question is a Kobo Aura HD, so it is definitely looking for a "Windows" start to its USB connection.

I am in the middle of trying to access the micro-sd that was in it for a while! that is also going badly. Gives me a chance to try and learn a few more corners of Linux behavior!  Most of the other devices I have are seen ok, just that faulty usb stick I had a recently.

My reading of the situation was that modprobe is already a kernel module, the person in the first link merely told the module to try both alternatives, the original USB standard way as well as the new default Windows way of accessing devices.

"An internet search indicated this is not an uncommon problem, and usbcore, which is compiled as a module in Hardy’s kernel, seems to be the culprit. Plenty of suggestions were offered online (including recompiling the kernel) but most of them did not help me at all.

Finally, I found something on an old mailing list that solved the problem. All I needed to do was add the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/options:"

Hi,

That is interesting, GParted declares it to be FAT16, but fdisk says FAT32?

sudo fdisk /dev/sdc -l                                                                                                                              
[sudo] password for mike:                                                                                                                                           
Disk /dev/sdc: 497.75 MiB, 521928192 bytes, 1019391 sectors
Disk model: DT Elite HS 2.0 
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x0408df67

Device     Boot Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1          63 1017855 1017793  497M  b W95 FAT32

This scenarion reminds me of some cheap memory sticks I bought online a while ago, One said it was 1Tb, but GParted could only find 8Mb!

Thanks guys, just had to use Gparted to shrink the partition by 2Mb and it now reports properly. as a drive in the unmount applet. It does not yet automount? not sure why. will try and google that.

The problem is that it will take me a lot of trial and error to work out which settings will help me.

Also when I am scrolling with the mouse, not touching the buttons, and no where near the trackpad, sometimes the mouse behaves as if it has "follow focus" behaviour, and at other times it definitely needs the click.
Then a single click while over a folder sometimes causes that folder to be highlighted, and at other times it automatically behaves as if it got a double click and takes the focus into the folder.
I really cannot work out yet what needs to be changed.

Thanks, I will remove that, but still need to find what has broken! I was using it successfully for several weeks, but now no networking, so have to copy off error messages by hand, as simpler that copying to usb etc.