Task manager includes memory card in disk usage

MikeS wrote:
On 09/02/2019 22:30, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sat, 09 Feb 2019 22:22:41 -0000, Andy Burns
wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:

Andy Burns wrote:

diskperf -Y or diskperf -N

This would turn off monitoring of C: as well?

Unfortunately, yes

There must be another way - if you're not seeing your card reader and I
am, there must be a setting we have different.

I was hoping you'd say you got no "eject" and then maybe something could
be done to persuade it that it was removable and should be hidden.

I can hide it in windows explorer, but task manager doesn't seem to
have many options. Not on the menus anyway, unless there's a hidden
command like diskperf that's more specific? Something is different
between our setups, but I'm not sure how to find out what it is. Oh
well, I'll just continue to remember 50% means 100% :-) I guess it's
easier than when I had two real hard disks, then I never knew if one
was maxed out. 50% could mean they're both half in use, or it could
mean one's a bottleneck. Of course the real answer is to throw money
at it and upgrade to an SSD, they are becoming very cheap nowadays.

After reading the above posts I now realise that your problem is not
with Task Manager, it is because you have a phantom drive (quite
common). To remove it:
Open a Command Prompt (Admin)
subst x: /d
OR
net use x: /delete
where X: is the drive letter of the phantom drive.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUBST

"Type SUBST with no parameters to
display a list of current virtual drives."

Mine returns a blank right now (no "drives" that way).

Paul

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 04:18:10 -0000, Rene Lamontagne wrote:

On 02/09/2019 8:50 PM, Sjouke Burry wrote:
On 9-2-2019 20:38, Commander Kinsey wrote:
My Windows 10 task manager shows the disk usage of C: (the system hard
disk) and E: (a memory card socket). This is quite annoying as the
total disk usage shows 50% when the hard disk is fully utilised,
because it's including the empty memory card socket. Any way of
stopping it including the memory card socket in the calculation?

Yep. Take the card out.

He did say "empty memory card socket"

Indeed, it always shows up as E: in task manager, even when empty. Short of disconnecting it inside the case, I can't make that E: go away. And I do use it every so often when I take videos and photos.

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 05:39:27 -0000, Paul wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 00:56:59 -0000, n/a wrote:

"Commander Kinsey" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 09 Feb 2019 23:12:17 -0000, n/a wrote:

"Commander Kinsey" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 09 Feb 2019 21:57:26 -0000, n/a wrote:

"Commander Kinsey" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 09 Feb 2019 21:36:30 -0000, n/a wrote:

"Commander Kinsey" wrote in message
news
My Windows 10 task manager shows the disk usage of C: (the system
hard
disk) and E: (a memory card socket). This is quite annoying as the
total
disk usage shows 50% when the hard disk is fully utilised, because
it's
including the empty memory card socket. Any way of stopping it
including
the memory card socket in the calculation?

See if this doesn't help.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...storage-spaces


If you've made a pool for storage space, this may be causing what
you're
seeing in Task Manager.

I have no pools. Just a standard 1TB rotary hard disk and a camera
card
reader.

Alright then... Are you referencing 'space used' or 'performance'

Task manager calls it "active time" in the performance tab. In the
processes tab (where it's annoying me), it's just a %.

In Task Manager, under the Process tab where you are seeing x% usage,
which
processes are being used? You can click on the column label % and it
will
then show the most used processes at that time at the top.

Yes I know I can sort them by most used.

You do realize that the Performance Active time is not the same as the
percentage of time the disk is being used by a Process.

The % listed at the top of the disk column in the processes tab is
identical to the active time % on the performance tab.

To get a better visualization, look at the Memory process column and
you
will see how much memory is being used by each process. If you were to
run
a disk utility and view it under Performance, you would see the
percentage
of time the disk is being used.

Also, the SDHC card should not be showing in the Performance tab.

Agreed, but it's there and I'd like rid of it.

If it is, then possibly something under "Storage Sense" where the SDHC
card (and all
drives show) and look at "More storage Settings" Change where content
is
saved.

Anything in any of the categories show anything but "This PC (C"

I'm not familiar with storage sense, please go into more detail.

Did you look where I referenced to see if the SDHC is being used?

For Storage Sense details - here's one reference:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/...18/08/30/9205/

I don't know what you want me to look at. Under storage sense, more
storage settings, change where content is saved, everything is listed as
C:, not the SDHC card.

And I don't understand what storage sense has to do with the task manager.

These are my results. My SD reader is a USB device with slots for SD
type only. It's a USB2 device, not a newer USB3 device.

The second picture shows a 512GB SSD on the end of a USB3 cable,
which makes it a "portable" device, but I suspect it also
has a "fixed disk" kind of status, which could be why it shows in
Task Manager.

https://i.postimg.cc/Yq1B77TB/SD-reader-empty.gif

https://i.postimg.cc/rmv76ZJp/SD-rea...SD-on-USB3.gif

I've made no attempt to capture benchmarks in there. Using
HDTune, each device achieves 85-90% of its graph while
HDTune benches the device. Since the SD is not shown in Task Manager,
we can't tell from there how it's doing. HDTune says my SD card
is doing 18MB/sec on read. It should do around 10MB/sec on write,
but I don't plan on upsetting the contents (as the SD belongs
to my digital camera).

Since the last release or two of Windows 10, there is a slight
amount of error in the HDTune bench, so some sort of temporal
issue exists for software. If I really want to bench the devices,
I'd be better off booting some other OS.

A user can use "perfmon.msc" to chart performance counters,
and there is a "disk read bytes per second" and a "disk write
bytes per second" in there, if you need to see performance.

No matter what utilities you happen to use on your Windows
system, stuff can refuse to be counted, or can be double-counted,
depending on circumstances. The performance counter system
is not without its selection of "corner cases".

The behavior of USB devices, can be affected by the RMB bit,
and there are USB keys with RMB set or RMB cleared for sale.
The Uwe Sieber web site has information on the side-effects
of these design choices. The industry seems to have "shifted"
a bit, now that Flash storage devices are getting larger.
Devices in the 16GB-32GB capacity range, are where you might
see the new RMB policy. Initially, I think some Sony flash
devices were doing this.

An SD reader could dabble in these practices too, so expect
to see different behaviors on your new USB3 SD reader versus
your yonks-old USB2 SD reader.

At least for my reader, it stayed off the charts in the
pictures. Only the SSD-on-a-USB3-cable was visible when
expected to be visible. And that's the cable that happens
to not handle power management states and flushing correctly.
You can't win...

Thanks for the in depth analysis - your computer is behaving quite sensibly. My SD reader shows as "removable" in the disk management console just like yours. How do I access the RMB bit etc somewhere? I'm assuming it's set correctly as my disk management says "removable", but maybe there's something else?

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 10:33:11 -0000, MikeS wrote:

On 09/02/2019 22:30, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sat, 09 Feb 2019 22:22:41 -0000, Andy Burns wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:

Andy Burns wrote:

diskperf -Y or diskperf -N

This would turn off monitoring of C: as well?

Unfortunately, yes

There must be another way - if you're not seeing your card reader and I
am, there must be a setting we have different.

I was hoping you'd say you got no "eject" and then maybe something could
be done to persuade it that it was removable and should be hidden.

I can hide it in windows explorer, but task manager doesn't seem to have
many options. Not on the menus anyway, unless there's a hidden command
like diskperf that's more specific? Something is different between our
setups, but I'm not sure how to find out what it is. Oh well, I'll just
continue to remember 50% means 100% :-) I guess it's easier than when I
had two real hard disks, then I never knew if one was maxed out. 50%
could mean they're both half in use, or it could mean one's a
bottleneck. Of course the real answer is to throw money at it and
upgrade to an SSD, they are becoming very cheap nowadays.

After reading the above posts I now realise that your problem is not
with Task Manager, it is because you have a phantom drive (quite
common). To remove it:
Open a Command Prompt (Admin)
subst x: /d
OR
net use x: /delete
where X: is the drive letter of the phantom drive.

Before I do that, is it reversible, and will it stop me using the card reader?

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 11:10:17 -0000, Paul wrote:

MikeS wrote:
On 09/02/2019 22:30, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sat, 09 Feb 2019 22:22:41 -0000, Andy Burns
wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:

Andy Burns wrote:

diskperf -Y or diskperf -N

This would turn off monitoring of C: as well?

Unfortunately, yes

There must be another way - if you're not seeing your card reader and I
am, there must be a setting we have different.

I was hoping you'd say you got no "eject" and then maybe something could
be done to persuade it that it was removable and should be hidden.

I can hide it in windows explorer, but task manager doesn't seem to
have many options. Not on the menus anyway, unless there's a hidden
command like diskperf that's more specific? Something is different
between our setups, but I'm not sure how to find out what it is. Oh
well, I'll just continue to remember 50% means 100% :-) I guess it's
easier than when I had two real hard disks, then I never knew if one
was maxed out. 50% could mean they're both half in use, or it could
mean one's a bottleneck. Of course the real answer is to throw money
at it and upgrade to an SSD, they are becoming very cheap nowadays.

After reading the above posts I now realise that your problem is not
with Task Manager, it is because you have a phantom drive (quite
common). To remove it:
Open a Command Prompt (Admin)
subst x: /d
OR
net use x: /delete
where X: is the drive letter of the phantom drive.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUBST

"Type SUBST with no parameters to
display a list of current virtual drives."

Mine returns a blank right now (no "drives" that way).

So does mine.

On 10/02/2019 13:00, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 10:33:11 -0000, MikeS wrote:

On 09/02/2019 22:30, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sat, 09 Feb 2019 22:22:41 -0000, Andy Burns
wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:

Andy Burns wrote:

diskperf -Y or diskperf -N

This would turn off monitoring of C: as well?

Unfortunately, yes

There must be another way - if you're not seeing your card reader
and I
am, there must be a setting we have different.

I was hoping you'd say you got no "eject" and then maybe something
could
be done to persuade it that it was removable and should be hidden.

I can hide it in windows explorer, but task manager doesn't seem to have
many options.* Not on the menus anyway, unless there's a hidden command
like diskperf that's more specific?* Something is different between our
setups, but I'm not sure how to find out what it is.* Oh well, I'll just
continue to remember 50% means 100% :-)* I guess it's easier than when I
had two real hard disks, then I never knew if one was maxed out.* 50%
could mean they're both half in use, or it could mean one's a
bottleneck.* Of course the real answer is to throw money at it and
upgrade to an SSD, they are becoming very cheap nowadays.
*
After reading the above posts I now realise that your problem is not
with Task Manager, it is because you have a phantom drive (quite
common). To remove it:
Open a Command Prompt (Admin)
subst x: /d
OR
net use x: /delete
where X: is the drive letter of the phantom drive.

Before I do that, is it reversible, and will it stop me using the card
reader?

You don't need to "reverse" it. Next time you insert an SD card it will
appear in File Explorer with a drive letter as usual. And the drive with
its letter should disappear when you safely remove the card.

If you use subst /? you will see:
Type SUBST with no parameters to display a list of current virtual drives.

A virtual drive is a real "substituted" drive which you can access by
its drive letter. Not the same as a phantom drive which does not
currently exist on the system and cannot be accessed by its drive letter.

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 13:56:36 -0000, MikeS wrote:

On 10/02/2019 13:00, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 10:33:11 -0000, MikeS wrote:

On 09/02/2019 22:30, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sat, 09 Feb 2019 22:22:41 -0000, Andy Burns
wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:

Andy Burns wrote:

diskperf -Y or diskperf -N

This would turn off monitoring of C: as well?

Unfortunately, yes

There must be another way - if you're not seeing your card reader
and I
am, there must be a setting we have different.

I was hoping you'd say you got no "eject" and then maybe something
could
be done to persuade it that it was removable and should be hidden.

I can hide it in windows explorer, but task manager doesn't seem to have
many options. Not on the menus anyway, unless there's a hidden command
like diskperf that's more specific? Something is different between our
setups, but I'm not sure how to find out what it is. Oh well, I'll just
continue to remember 50% means 100% :-) I guess it's easier than when I
had two real hard disks, then I never knew if one was maxed out. 50%
could mean they're both half in use, or it could mean one's a
bottleneck. Of course the real answer is to throw money at it and
upgrade to an SSD, they are becoming very cheap nowadays.

After reading the above posts I now realise that your problem is not
with Task Manager, it is because you have a phantom drive (quite
common). To remove it:
Open a Command Prompt (Admin)
subst x: /d
OR
net use x: /delete
where X: is the drive letter of the phantom drive.

Before I do that, is it reversible, and will it stop me using the card
reader?

You don't need to "reverse" it. Next time you insert an SD card it will
appear in File Explorer with a drive letter as usual. And the drive with
its letter should disappear when you safely remove the card.

If you use subst /? you will see:
Type SUBST with no parameters to display a list of current virtual drives.

A virtual drive is a real "substituted" drive which you can access by
its drive letter. Not the same as a phantom drive which does not
currently exist on the system and cannot be accessed by its drive letter.

I don't think this is my problem, this is what I typed:

------------------------------------------
Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.17763.253]
(c) 2018 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Users\pcsubst

C:\Users\pcsubst e: /d
Invalid parameter - E:

C:\Users\pcnet use
New connections will be remembered.

There are no entries in the list.

C:\Users\pcnet use e: /d
The network connection could not be found.

More help is available by typing NET HELPMSG 2250.
------------------------------------------

Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 10:33:11 -0000, MikeS wrote:

On 09/02/2019 22:30, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sat, 09 Feb 2019 22:22:41 -0000, Andy Burns
wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:

Andy Burns wrote:

diskperf -Y or diskperf -N

This would turn off monitoring of C: as well?

Unfortunately, yes

There must be another way - if you're not seeing your card reader
and I
am, there must be a setting we have different.

I was hoping you'd say you got no "eject" and then maybe something
could
be done to persuade it that it was removable and should be hidden.

I can hide it in windows explorer, but task manager doesn't seem to have
many options. Not on the menus anyway, unless there's a hidden command
like diskperf that's more specific? Something is different between our
setups, but I'm not sure how to find out what it is. Oh well, I'll just
continue to remember 50% means 100% :-) I guess it's easier than when I
had two real hard disks, then I never knew if one was maxed out. 50%
could mean they're both half in use, or it could mean one's a
bottleneck. Of course the real answer is to throw money at it and
upgrade to an SSD, they are becoming very cheap nowadays.

After reading the above posts I now realise that your problem is not
with Task Manager, it is because you have a phantom drive (quite
common). To remove it:
Open a Command Prompt (Admin)
subst x: /d
OR
net use x: /delete
where X: is the drive letter of the phantom drive.

Before I do that, is it reversible, and will it stop me using the card
reader?

Are there any notations in Disk Management we should know about ?
It does have some notations. And for Storage Spaces, it's strangely
mute for the volume that creates.

https://www.howtogeek.com/school/usi...a-pro/lesson4/

In diskpart, there is "list volumes" and "list partitions"
and when a partition is selected, a "detail partition" command.
You can get some information about your storage setup in there.
It's a command line program you can run in Command Prompt, intended
to do some of the same things as Disk Management. The information
commands may provide more info than Disk Management can.

And while "fsutil" has some info about the NTFS used for a
particular drive letter, it isn't likely to give details
about other layers in the storage cake.

I don't really have any good third-party utilities for this.
The software I have, is too old to cover what's in Win10.

Paul

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 14:23:10 -0000, Paul wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 10:33:11 -0000, MikeS wrote:

On 09/02/2019 22:30, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sat, 09 Feb 2019 22:22:41 -0000, Andy Burns
wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:

Andy Burns wrote:

diskperf -Y or diskperf -N

This would turn off monitoring of C: as well?

Unfortunately, yes

There must be another way - if you're not seeing your card reader
and I
am, there must be a setting we have different.

I was hoping you'd say you got no "eject" and then maybe something
could
be done to persuade it that it was removable and should be hidden.

I can hide it in windows explorer, but task manager doesn't seem to have
many options. Not on the menus anyway, unless there's a hidden command
like diskperf that's more specific? Something is different between our
setups, but I'm not sure how to find out what it is. Oh well, I'll just
continue to remember 50% means 100% :-) I guess it's easier than when I
had two real hard disks, then I never knew if one was maxed out. 50%
could mean they're both half in use, or it could mean one's a
bottleneck. Of course the real answer is to throw money at it and
upgrade to an SSD, they are becoming very cheap nowadays.

After reading the above posts I now realise that your problem is not
with Task Manager, it is because you have a phantom drive (quite
common). To remove it:
Open a Command Prompt (Admin)
subst x: /d
OR
net use x: /delete
where X: is the drive letter of the phantom drive.

Before I do that, is it reversible, and will it stop me using the card
reader?

Are there any notations in Disk Management we should know about ?

What am I looking for?

It does have some notations. And for Storage Spaces, it's strangely
mute for the volume that creates.

https://www.howtogeek.com/school/usi...a-pro/lesson4/

In diskpart, there is "list volumes"

DISKPART list volume

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 0 F DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 Recovery NTFS Partition 499 MB Healthy
Volume 2 C NTFS Partition 930 GB Healthy Boot
Volume 3 FAT32 Partition 99 MB Healthy System
Volume 4 E Removable 0 B No Media

and "list partitions"
and when a partition is selected, a "detail partition" command.

Ho do I select the disk E?

DISKPART select disk=4

The disk you specified is not valid.

There is no disk selected.

DISKPART select disk=E

The disk you specified is not valid.

There is no disk selected.

DISKPART select disk=volume 4

The arguments specified for this command are not valid.
For more information on the command type: HELP SELECT DISK

There is no disk selected.

You can get some information about your storage setup in there.
It's a command line program you can run in Command Prompt, intended
to do some of the same things as Disk Management. The information
commands may provide more info than Disk Management can.

And while "fsutil" has some info about the NTFS used for a
particular drive letter, it isn't likely to give details
about other layers in the storage cake.

I don't really have any good third-party utilities for this.
The software I have, is too old to cover what's in Win10.

Commander Kinsey wrote:
[...]

DISKPART list volume

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 0 F DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 Recovery NTFS Partition 499 MB Healthy
Volume 2 C NTFS Partition 930 GB Healthy Boot
Volume 3 FAT32 Partition 99 MB Healthy System
Volume 4 E Removable 0 B No Media

It may be hardware - i.e. interface, controller, 'drive', etc. -
dependent, but I think the entry for 'E' is not normal.

On my system, if there's no media - i.e. no SD-card - in the drive,
there is no entry at all for the drive.

So for me it's *either*:

Volume 5 M BCKUPRECENT FAT32 Removable 3777 MB Healthy

*or* no entry at all, i.e. no Volume 5.

Perhaps others can check how these things are on their systems.

And perhaps you (CK) can check how things look if there *is*
(formatted) media in the drive.

And you *do* eject the media by *first* doing a software eject (i.e.
right-click - Eject in File Explorer), don't you? (I.e. not just
physically removing the card from the drive.)

[...]

Frank Slootweg wrote:
Commander Kinsey wrote:
[...]

DISKPART list volume

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 0 F DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 Recovery NTFS Partition 499 MB Healthy
Volume 2 C NTFS Partition 930 GB Healthy Boot
Volume 3 FAT32 Partition 99 MB Healthy System
Volume 4 E Removable 0 B No Media

It may be hardware - i.e. interface, controller, 'drive', etc. -
dependent, but I think the entry for 'E' is not normal.

On my system, if there's no media - i.e. no SD-card - in the drive,
there is no entry at all for the drive.

So for me it's *either*:

Volume 5 M BCKUPRECENT FAT32 Removable 3777 MB Healthy

*or* no entry at all, i.e. no Volume 5.

Perhaps others can check how these things are on their systems.

And perhaps you (CK) can check how things look if there *is*
(formatted) media in the drive.

And you *do* eject the media by *first* doing a software eject (i.e.
right-click - Eject in File Explorer), don't you? (I.e. not just
physically removing the card from the drive.)

[...]

Since the complaint seemingly involves the card reader
device, you want to evaluate it with media present.

In diskpart,

list disk # lists the device numbers just like Disk Management
select disk X # focus on one disk
list partitions # list the partition numbers on the selected disk
list volumes
select partition Y # focus on a partition
detail partition
exit

Whereas fsutil would work at the drive letter level
and presumably tell you uninteresting things about
the NTFS setup. I think that's about all that is there.

It's possible a WMIC query would work too, but the
namespace item is "physicaldisk" which doesn't tell
you much about "layerings" on top of that.

HTH,
Paul

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 19:43:15 -0000, Frank Slootweg wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:
[...]

DISKPART list volume

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 0 F DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 Recovery NTFS Partition 499 MB Healthy
Volume 2 C NTFS Partition 930 GB Healthy Boot
Volume 3 FAT32 Partition 99 MB Healthy System
Volume 4 E Removable 0 B No Media

It may be hardware - i.e. interface, controller, 'drive', etc. -
dependent, but I think the entry for 'E' is not normal.

Agreed, they probably all behave differently.

On my system, if there's no media - i.e. no SD-card - in the drive,
there is no entry at all for the drive.

So for me it's *either*:

Volume 5 M BCKUPRECENT FAT32 Removable 3777 MB Healthy

*or* no entry at all, i.e. no Volume 5.

Perhaps others can check how these things are on their systems.

And perhaps you (CK) can check how things look if there *is*
(formatted) media in the drive.

I get the same as you:

Volume 4 E DICAM-400 FAT32 Removable 29 GB Healthy

And you *do* eject the media by *first* doing a software eject (i.e.
right-click - Eject in File Explorer), don't you? (I.e. not just
physically removing the card from the drive.)

No, I haven't done that since about windows 98 when it used to be stupid enough to write-behind cache removable drives.

Anyway, I can start up my computer never having had a card in the slot today, and the problem still exists, so it's not due to a phantom card left in there.

I just inserted it, then ejected as you suggested, then physically removed it, then still got the above:

Volume 4 E Removable 0 B No Media

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 20:41:28 -0000, Paul wrote:

Frank Slootweg wrote:
Commander Kinsey wrote:
[...]

DISKPART list volume

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 0 F DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 Recovery NTFS Partition 499 MB Healthy
Volume 2 C NTFS Partition 930 GB Healthy Boot
Volume 3 FAT32 Partition 99 MB Healthy System
Volume 4 E Removable 0 B No Media

It may be hardware - i.e. interface, controller, 'drive', etc. -
dependent, but I think the entry for 'E' is not normal.

On my system, if there's no media - i.e. no SD-card - in the drive,
there is no entry at all for the drive.

So for me it's *either*:

Volume 5 M BCKUPRECENT FAT32 Removable 3777 MB Healthy

*or* no entry at all, i.e. no Volume 5.

Perhaps others can check how these things are on their systems.

And perhaps you (CK) can check how things look if there *is*
(formatted) media in the drive.

And you *do* eject the media by *first* doing a software eject (i.e.
right-click - Eject in File Explorer), don't you? (I.e. not just
physically removing the card from the drive.)

[...]

Since the complaint seemingly involves the card reader
device, you want to evaluate it with media present.

In diskpart,

list disk # lists the device numbers just like Disk Management

DISKPART list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 931 GB 0 B *
Disk 1 Online 29 GB 0 B

select disk X # focus on one disk

DISKPART select disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

list partitions # list the partition numbers on the selected disk

DISKPART list partition

Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
* Partition 1 Primary 29 GB 0 B
* Partition 1 Primary 29 GB 0 B

****** Why are there two identical entries here? ******

list volumes

DISKPART list volume

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 0 F DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 Recovery NTFS Partition 499 MB Healthy
Volume 2 C NTFS Partition 930 GB Healthy Boot
Volume 3 FAT32 Partition 99 MB Healthy System

****** Where is the entry for my card?! ******

select partition Y # focus on a partition

DISKPART select partition=1

There is no partition selected.

****** It won't select number 1, even thought there are two number 1s in the partition list earlier. *******

detail partition
exit

Whereas fsutil would work at the drive letter level
and presumably tell you uninteresting things about
the NTFS setup. I think that's about all that is there.

It's possible a WMIC query would work too, but the
namespace item is "physicaldisk" which doesn't tell
you much about "layerings" on top of that.

HTH,
Paul

Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 20:41:28 -0000, Paul wrote:

Frank Slootweg wrote:
Commander Kinsey wrote:
[...]

DISKPART list volume

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size
Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- -------
--------- --------
Volume 0 F DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 Recovery NTFS Partition 499 MB Healthy
Volume 2 C NTFS Partition 930 GB
Healthy Boot
Volume 3 FAT32 Partition 99 MB
Healthy System
Volume 4 E Removable 0 B No Media

It may be hardware - i.e. interface, controller, 'drive', etc. -
dependent, but I think the entry for 'E' is not normal.

On my system, if there's no media - i.e. no SD-card - in the drive,
there is no entry at all for the drive.

So for me it's *either*:

Volume 5 M BCKUPRECENT FAT32 Removable 3777 MB Healthy

*or* no entry at all, i.e. no Volume 5.

Perhaps others can check how these things are on their systems.

And perhaps you (CK) can check how things look if there *is*
(formatted) media in the drive.

And you *do* eject the media by *first* doing a software eject (i.e.
right-click - Eject in File Explorer), don't you? (I.e. not just
physically removing the card from the drive.)

[...]

Since the complaint seemingly involves the card reader
device, you want to evaluate it with media present.

In diskpart,

list disk # lists the device numbers just like Disk Management

DISKPART list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 931 GB 0 B *
Disk 1 Online 29 GB 0 B

select disk X # focus on one disk

DISKPART select disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

list partitions # list the partition numbers on the selected disk

DISKPART list partition

Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
* Partition 1 Primary 29 GB 0 B
* Partition 1 Primary 29 GB 0 B

****** Why are there two identical entries here? ******

list volumes

DISKPART list volume

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- ---------
--------
Volume 0 F DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 Recovery NTFS Partition 499 MB Healthy
Volume 2 C NTFS Partition 930 GB Healthy Boot
Volume 3 FAT32 Partition 99 MB Healthy
System

****** Where is the entry for my card?! ******

select partition Y # focus on a partition

DISKPART select partition=1

There is no partition selected.

****** It won't select number 1, even thought there are two number 1s
in the partition list earlier. *******

detail partition
exit

Whereas fsutil would work at the drive letter level
and presumably tell you uninteresting things about
the NTFS setup. I think that's about all that is there.

It's possible a WMIC query would work too, but the
namespace item is "physicaldisk" which doesn't tell
you much about "layerings" on top of that.

HTH,
Paul

You'll notice in my example, I use *no* equals sign.

select partition 1

Diskpart uses selectors, to "focus" on one item at
a time when working. The selection is maintained
until you change it, or until you "exit".

And no, your result is *not* normal. This is obviously
a 32GB flash device, but I don't know why the partition
entry is duplicated.

DISKPART list partition

Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
* Partition 1 Primary 29 GB 0 B
* Partition 1 Primary 29 GB 0 B

*******

Note that, USB storage devices (in Windows), are only
expected to have one partition. If you were using
PTEDIT32.exe, you'd expect to see just one row in
the table.

When multiple partitions are present, Windows ignores
partition 2,3,4 etc.

Linux on the other hand, supports USB mass storage just
like it was a hard drive, and you can have four Primary
partitions in that case.

*******

PTEDIT32 was available for years, as a download from
Symantec after they acquired PowerQuest. Eventually, they
removed their FTP server content, and we lost access. The
only way to get PTEDIT32 today, is via this route. PTEDIT32
was considered a freebie, and there is no license key issue
with respect to the "demo" package. Just unzip it and
fetch out the PTEDIT32.exe file. While the main program
is licensed, PTEDIT32 was considered a "utility" freebie.

http://www.download3k.com/System-Uti...ion-Magic.html

enpm800retaildemo.zip 23,776,770 bytes

You can use 7ZIP to burrow into the file and extract
the copy of PTEDIT32.exe.

L:\enpm800retaildemo.zip\Setup\PMagic.cab\
PTEDIT32.EXE 503,808 bytes September 16, 2002, 2:24:48 AM

In 7ZIP, it's under:

C:\Downloads\enpm800retaildemo.zip\Setup\PMagic.ca b\

PTEDIT32.exe 503,808 bytes

Once extracted, you run that as Administrator, or otherwise
it won't be able to access the MBR and present a nice table
of partitions.

https://i.postimg.cc/ry1jSSnx/MBR-partition-table.gif

If you don't run it as Administrator, it returns "Error 5",
which is a permissions error.

Note that it's intolerant of drives with Vista+ one megabyte
alignment. However, for your 32GB SD card with the goofy
partition problem, I'm hoping it will provide some evidence.

PowerQuest put a lot of constraints on their software.
Sometimes, you'd get lots of "warning" dialogs, when such
warnings weren't necessary. The sucky part, was when
their software "absolutely refused to work and quit". This
is all done to protect your disks, but it still sucks, as
there weren't really all that many geometry constraints on
real disks. Much more creative geometries should have been
possible, than popular tools supported in an easy way.

In any case, that's a nice tool for reviewing some of
my older disk drives. To see what is actually in the table!

*******

In Linux, "sudo fdisk /dev/sda" followed by "p to print"
then "q to quit" would give the same table of information.
The beauty of PTEDIT32, is you could actually *edit* the
MBR, which I've done a couple times. You can actually move
a partition entry and put it back in spatial order. Like,
swap entry three with entry four when the situation dictates.
On WinXP, then you have to edit the boot.ini and fix the
"path" to the disk partition to match (since the partition
entry of your OS might have changed). That was a useful function
in the old days. Not so necessary now, as modern tools don't
do stupid stuff needing such fixes.

Paul

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 21:57:42 -0000, Paul wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 20:41:28 -0000, Paul wrote:

Frank Slootweg wrote:
Commander Kinsey wrote:
[...]

DISKPART list volume

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size
Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- -------
--------- --------
Volume 0 F DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 Recovery NTFS Partition 499 MB Healthy
Volume 2 C NTFS Partition 930 GB
Healthy Boot
Volume 3 FAT32 Partition 99 MB
Healthy System
Volume 4 E Removable 0 B No Media

It may be hardware - i.e. interface, controller, 'drive', etc. -
dependent, but I think the entry for 'E' is not normal.

On my system, if there's no media - i.e. no SD-card - in the drive,
there is no entry at all for the drive.

So for me it's *either*:

Volume 5 M BCKUPRECENT FAT32 Removable 3777 MB Healthy

*or* no entry at all, i.e. no Volume 5.

Perhaps others can check how these things are on their systems.

And perhaps you (CK) can check how things look if there *is*
(formatted) media in the drive.

And you *do* eject the media by *first* doing a software eject (i.e.
right-click - Eject in File Explorer), don't you? (I.e. not just
physically removing the card from the drive.)

[...]

Since the complaint seemingly involves the card reader
device, you want to evaluate it with media present.

In diskpart,

list disk # lists the device numbers just like Disk Management

DISKPART list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 931 GB 0 B *
Disk 1 Online 29 GB 0 B

select disk X # focus on one disk

DISKPART select disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

list partitions # list the partition numbers on the selected disk

DISKPART list partition

Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
* Partition 1 Primary 29 GB 0 B
* Partition 1 Primary 29 GB 0 B

****** Why are there two identical entries here? ******

list volumes

DISKPART list volume

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- ---------
--------
Volume 0 F DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 Recovery NTFS Partition 499 MB Healthy
Volume 2 C NTFS Partition 930 GB Healthy Boot
Volume 3 FAT32 Partition 99 MB Healthy
System

****** Where is the entry for my card?! ******

select partition Y # focus on a partition

DISKPART select partition=1

There is no partition selected.

****** It won't select number 1, even thought there are two number 1s
in the partition list earlier. *******

detail partition
exit

Whereas fsutil would work at the drive letter level
and presumably tell you uninteresting things about
the NTFS setup. I think that's about all that is there.

It's possible a WMIC query would work too, but the
namespace item is "physicaldisk" which doesn't tell
you much about "layerings" on top of that.

HTH,
Paul

You'll notice in my example, I use *no* equals sign.

select partition 1

Equals sign or not, I always get "there is no partition selected".

Strangely, doing exactly the same again, I now only get one entry in the partition list, and I have volume 4 for the card, which was previously missing.

I shall hereby give up and assume the hardware (or driver) for the card reader is flaky. It's not that big a deal having 50% instead of 100% in the disk usage anyway!

Diskpart uses selectors, to "focus" on one item at
a time when working. The selection is maintained
until you change it, or until you "exit".

And no, your result is *not* normal. This is obviously
a 32GB flash device, but I don't know why the partition
entry is duplicated.

DISKPART list partition

Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
* Partition 1 Primary 29 GB 0 B
* Partition 1 Primary 29 GB 0 B

*******

Note that, USB storage devices (in Windows), are only
expected to have one partition. If you were using
PTEDIT32.exe, you'd expect to see just one row in
the table.

When multiple partitions are present, Windows ignores
partition 2,3,4 etc.

Linux on the other hand, supports USB mass storage just
like it was a hard drive, and you can have four Primary
partitions in that case.

*******

PTEDIT32 was available for years, as a download from
Symantec after they acquired PowerQuest. Eventually, they
removed their FTP server content, and we lost access. The
only way to get PTEDIT32 today, is via this route. PTEDIT32
was considered a freebie, and there is no license key issue
with respect to the "demo" package. Just unzip it and
fetch out the PTEDIT32.exe file. While the main program
is licensed, PTEDIT32 was considered a "utility" freebie.

http://www.download3k.com/System-Uti...ion-Magic.html

enpm800retaildemo.zip 23,776,770 bytes

You can use 7ZIP to burrow into the file and extract
the copy of PTEDIT32.exe.

L:\enpm800retaildemo.zip\Setup\PMagic.cab\
PTEDIT32.EXE 503,808 bytes September 16, 2002, 2:24:48 AM

In 7ZIP, it's under:

C:\Downloads\enpm800retaildemo.zip\Setup\PMagic.ca b\

PTEDIT32.exe 503,808 bytes

Once extracted, you run that as Administrator, or otherwise
it won't be able to access the MBR and present a nice table
of partitions.

https://i.postimg.cc/ry1jSSnx/MBR-partition-table.gif

If you don't run it as Administrator, it returns "Error 5",
which is a permissions error.

Note that it's intolerant of drives with Vista+ one megabyte
alignment. However, for your 32GB SD card with the goofy
partition problem, I'm hoping it will provide some evidence.

PowerQuest put a lot of constraints on their software.
Sometimes, you'd get lots of "warning" dialogs, when such
warnings weren't necessary. The sucky part, was when
their software "absolutely refused to work and quit". This
is all done to protect your disks, but it still sucks, as
there weren't really all that many geometry constraints on
real disks. Much more creative geometries should have been
possible, than popular tools supported in an easy way.

In any case, that's a nice tool for reviewing some of
my older disk drives. To see what is actually in the table!

*******

In Linux, "sudo fdisk /dev/sda" followed by "p to print"
then "q to quit" would give the same table of information.
The beauty of PTEDIT32, is you could actually *edit* the
MBR, which I've done a couple times. You can actually move
a partition entry and put it back in spatial order. Like,
swap entry three with entry four when the situation dictates.
On WinXP, then you have to edit the boot.ini and fix the
"path" to the disk partition to match (since the partition
entry of your OS might have changed). That was a useful function
in the old days. Not so necessary now, as modern tools don't
do stupid stuff needing such fixes.

Paul