Please note that Pocket Mechanic Professional is a brand new (unavailable/not-yet-announced) at the time of writing of the article), completely rewritten product. In the article, I referred to Pocket Mechanic, not to Pocket Mechanic Professional. I, along with several other users, did have problems with Pocket Mechanic's unability to fix errors that the desktop-based, plain chkdsk would have easily fixed.

I haven't tested Pocket Mechanic Professional in this respect as yet. Will try to do it soon and will also post the results.

Are you sure the write protection latch isn't in the "protected" position?

As promised, I've continued researching this subject; File Store uses FAT and, under certain circumstances, can be formatted. I'll publish a tutorial on all this really soon.

I'm absolutely sure there's wear levelling in all built-in ROM's. If there wasn't, then, even the smallest bit error would cause tremendous problems and would render all ROM's practically useless.

In most cases levelling works on the bit level. I don't think the file system controller sees these problems and allocates the blocks used to avoid them â€“ with most flash memories, the outer world only sees a homogenous address range, of which every single bit is usable. At the flash controller level, there's some kind of mapping out of bad bits (that is, 4-8 bytes in general), of course.

As the operating system, however, doesn't see anything of them, it won't repartition a file while it's written to the file store and, therefore, no performance degradation will occur (because it won't need to update the file allocation table to leave out dead bits).

As far as formatting the built-in, user-writable flash ROM is concerned, there're two cases: pre-WM5 and WM5 devices.

pre-WM5 devices need special key combinations at boot time to format (initialize) their File Store; it's not formatted during "standard" hard resets. A lot of these devices allow for these.
WM5 devices, on the other hand, automatically "format" their entire ROM (they don't have anything like File Store, except for Pocket PC Phone Edition devices with their unlockable and, therefore, for the user available Extended ROM). When you hard reset a WM5 device, the operating system initializes the storage. The ROM in the HTC Wizard even calls this "Format FAT partition" (of course, this doesn't mean it must be using the traditional FAT file system.)

As far as the file system format of the ROM is concerned, to my knowledge, it's not FAT. I may be wrong though â€“ I will check out the related docs some time.

Smartphone &amp; Pocket PC magazine - Comments for "How do I defragment my Pocket PC memory cards? Do I need this at all?"

Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine - Comments for "How do I defragment my Pocket PC memory cards? Do I need this at all?"