[SOLVED] Missing space on an sd card

[james147]

Hey, one of my sd cards seems to have lost ~6-7gigs of space. It is meant to be a 8GB image, but is now seen as 1GiB, results of fdisk:

# fdisk /dev/sdb -l


Disk /dev/sdb: 1044 MB, 1044688896 bytes, 2040408 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

This card is used as a test image for my raspberry pi so gets dd'd allot which is where I think the problem started. I have tried zeroing the disk (dding /dev/zero) but (like any attempts to dd now) results in drive full errors at the ~1GiB mark.

I am not sure what else can be done to recover this and cannot find any useful information online (if there is any its hidden in pages of people "losing" space to the GB/GiB confusion).

Is the space recoverable or is the disk now permanently damaged? I have seen a sd card do this before, but it was only an old small one and I couldn't be bother to try and fix it.

It is no big loss if it isn't recoverable (I have plenty of others about), but I would like to try in case it happens again or know what happened so I can avoid it happening again.

[james147]

Hmm, tried another card and it had the same output as the first (on fdisk) and then same with a third... no other /dev/sd?? files except /dev/sda so not sure what happened but a reboot seems to have fixed it. I can now access the whole drive again. Strange...