New BCD436HP bricked?

[kc2kth]

Upman, thank you for the link. It's downloading now. I think at this point since we're all here I'll reply only to this thread instead of on the Uniden forum. Later we can pose a summary there if we all think that is worthwhile.

While I'm waiting for the download I pulled the scanner out and plugged it into my work laptop (Win7) and it too was having a very hard time initializing the disk. The sdformatter tool did not see the disk at all and in fact it's UI wouldn't even start - I ended the process via Task Manager after each attempt to get it to start. Windows was asking (after a few minutes trying to initialize the disk) to format the disk so I finally let it do so. Once that format completed I ran the sdformatter tool and it was able to see the disk now so I reformatted it again with the default sdformatter settings. More to come once Sentinel is down and installed.

 

[kc2kth]

Back up and running!

I am back up and running! After the format completed and the download completed I installed Sentinel. I used the 'Clear User Data' feature, downloaded the latest database from Uniden and then wrote that to the scanner. I'm back to where I was. I'm not sure about the path forward though. I'm not sure if I'm safe plugging this scanner into my home Mac computers to keep the internal battery charged or to charge the rechargeable AA batteries. Even though the disk was never mounted under the Mac OS something hosed the card. I believe the other user who believed it was an issue between the Uniden firmware and the Parallels USB driver was likely on the right track. I see VirtualBox users with similar issues.

Any thoughts other than buying another computer?

 

[tonyclark]

MAC:

Make
All
Corrupt

 

[kc2kth]

Tony,

I realize you were in all likelihood joking, but I want to point out again just to avoid any confusion regarding the root cause that at no time was the card mounted under Mac OS, therefore Mac OS could never have performed a single read or write from/to the card. I confirmed this last night where I observed the device was recognized (as /dev/disk1s0 for those interested) but that 'mount' indicated the only disk slices mounted were the internal hard disk of the Macbook (/dev/disk0s2 as /) and the external Synology SAN mounted for Time Machine use (/dev/disk3s2 as /Volumes/Time Machine Backups).

 

[durangoGreg]

If the OP has Sentinel, he simply needs to use the "Clear User Data" in Sentinel and set "Show All Drives" in the popup window. This will write all necessary files to the SD card.

Unfortunately, Macs have a history of corrupting SD cards that are used in devices (not just for scanners). We recommend you use a PC.

This is just completely untrue and misinformation. The problem is not with the Mac or Parallels but with the Uniden USB firmware.

I use my Macs with SD cards all the time, no problem. I use numerous radios with my Mac using Parallels, no problem. I have used numerous audio devices, USB drives, card readers, etc. never a problem with Mac running Parallels. In fact, I use my Home Patrol-1 routinely with my Mac running Parallels, never a problem. Only the x36 radios break Parallels on a Mac. Also only x36 radios routinely are having problems with the USB port and SD cards even on a PC.

So for UPMan to come on here and make a comment about Macs having a history of corrupting SD cards when it is obviously the firmware or cheap USB hardware in the X36 radios that is an issue, really is ridiculous.

 

[durangoGreg]

I am back up and running! After the format completed and the download completed I installed Sentinel. I used the 'Clear User Data' feature, downloaded the latest database from Uniden and then wrote that to the scanner. I'm back to where I was. I'm not sure about the path forward though. I'm not sure if I'm safe plugging this scanner into my home Mac computers to keep the internal battery charged or to charge the rechargeable AA batteries. Even though the disk was never mounted under the Mac OS something hosed the card. I believe the other user who believed it was an issue between the Uniden firmware and the Parallels USB driver was likely on the right track. I see VirtualBox users with similar issues.

Any thoughts other than buying another computer?

Get an SD Card reader for your Mac. They are dirt cheap and they work. You can use your MicroSD card in the card reader with Sentinel running on a Mac. Absolutely no corruption. No problem. The real problem is the USB firmware and a conflict with the USB driver in Parallels.

I use an SD card reader and program my BCD536HP scanner just fine using Parallels and Sentinel.

These people who blame the Macs for corrupting the SD card are completely wrong. In addition Uniden is having numerous issues with the SD cards and USB serial mode even on a PC.

 

[kc2kth]

Greg,

Thanks for the input. I'm still concerned with the charging aspect since the 436 only uses USB for charging. I'm not sure yet if it's safe to use a USB to wall (mains) adapter for this. Also I so far haven't been able to remove the SD card from my scanner - it doesn't seem to release like it should when I press on it. If I can get by those last two issues the card reader option is fine with me.

 

[JamesO]

The 436HP can be powered from any standard USB wall charger. I would be careful to stay away from iPad type wall chargers and other tablet chargers as they typically put out more than the 500mA that a the USB standard is designed around. The higher current USB power adapters may work, but I am not sure if the 436HP has the circuitry to support/manage the higher current from a tablet charger.

As for the SD card, it does come out of the 436HP but you need to be careful. The way it is removed is the metal carrier slides about 1/8" to unlatch then the carrier hinges upward. You may need a magnifying glass to really see what is going on, but once you figure it out, it is pretty easy to open and removed the card. Just be careful as the metal carrier can bend easily.

Also suggest you purchase a spare SD card and keep a clone taped on the inside of the battery door for any future fiasco.

 

[Jay911]

You can use anything that provides a powered USB connection to power the 436. Even a garden variety cellphone wall charger, i.e. the little cubes that you can get for $1.99 at the 7-11 counter, work just fine.

As for Greg's.. shall we say 'energetic' ... insistence that Macs don't corrupt removable drives with their hidden files/folders, I have plenty of experience in fields other than with this particular scanner radio to back it up as being true (that they do corrupt). It's nice that you've found otherwise, Greg, but your experience is not true universally.

And kc2kth, the 436 has a screwball way of holding in the USB card. You have to slide the metal cover to one side and flip it open, which will then allow you to lift the card out. It doesn't slide in and out like cards do in other applications.

 

[wise871]

This is just completely untrue and misinformation. The problem is not with the Mac or Parallels but with the Uniden USB firmware.

I use my Macs with SD cards all the time, no problem. I use numerous radios with my Mac using Parallels, no problem. I have used numerous audio devices, USB drives, card readers, etc. never a problem with Mac running Parallels. In fact, I use my Home Patrol-1 routinely with my Mac running Parallels, never a problem. Only the x36 radios break Parallels on a Mac. Also only x36 radios routinely are having problems with the USB port and SD cards even on a PC.

So for UPMan to come on here and make a comment about Macs having a history of corrupting SD cards when it is obviously the firmware or cheap USB hardware in the X36 radios that is an issue, really is ridiculous.

I also agree with what is mentioned above. I have been a Mac user for many years. I have used it with Parallels and Bootcamp for every single USB device I own to include Uniden, GRE, Radio Shack scanners, DSLR, etc. If it's USB or SD I pretty much plug it up and I have never had issues until the x36 came out. To say MAC's are known for this is not a true statement.

I also have windows PC's and the have the same issues. The majority of the users reporting problems are Windows users from what I see.



Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[kc2kth]

..the 436 has a screwball way of holding in the USB card. You have to slide the metal cover to one side and flip it open, which will then allow you to lift the card out. It doesn't slide in and out like cards do in other applications.

Jay, you are spot on here. I just discovered this myself. I took the scanner out in the bright sunlight with the intent of getting a look at the locking mechanism. Immediately I saw the "<- LOCK UNLOCK ->" indicator stamped on the aluminum slide. Slid that over and it popped right out. I'm assuming this was a manufacturing change since the manual clearly indicates this should be a spring lock:

"Carefully remove the microSD card by using a thumbnail or pencil eraser to push the card in so it will spring out. Handle with care if you are going to use it in a card reader. Gently install the microSD card the same way it was removed and to push the card in so it will spring back into place."

That just ain't true. At least on ours it's not Jay. Thanks for the tips on the charging as well. I'm going to track down something that stays below the 500 ma level for charging, at least until Uniden issues a fix for the whole what I'm classifying as not a Mac issue but a virutalization driver issue since this seems to be a Parallels and VirutalBox more than a Mac OS issue.

So overall I think that Uniden has a solid Beta product here. The documentation and firmware clearly need some effort for clarification and compatibility. No one should pay $530 (with shipping) for a new scanner and go through what I - someone with 30 years scanner experience and 20 years in IT - went through in the last 18 hours.

I want to once again thank everyone who contributed to this thread as well as the one over on the Uniden board. I greatly appreciate your time and patience while we worked through and documented a few issues here - including details on resolution and likely problem areas that others will run into. Special thanks to UpMan for posting a link to the software while Uniden's web site is down for an extended period, without which my 436 would already have been enroute back to the supplier for a refund (except for all the shipping charges which would have been on me).

 

[kc2kth]

The 436HP can be powered from any standard USB wall charger. I would be careful to stay away from iPad type wall chargers and other tablet chargers as they typically put out more than the 500mA that a the USB standard is designed around. The higher current USB power adapters may work, but I am not sure if the 436HP has the circuitry to support/manage the higher current from a tablet charger.

As for the SD card, it does come out of the 436HP but you need to be careful. The way it is removed is the metal carrier slides about 1/8" to unlatch then the carrier hinges upward. You may need a magnifying glass to really see what is going on, but once you figure it out, it is pretty easy to open and removed the card. Just be careful as the metal carrier can bend easily.

Also suggest you purchase a spare SD card and keep a clone taped on the inside of the battery door for any future fiasco.

Thanks James, I read Jay's post before reading yours, but you both were on the right track. Much appreciated.

 

[Jay911]

Those instructions about using a thumbnail or pencil eraser are for the 536.. the manual was written for both radios together, and Uniden's manuals are one place that they don't necessarily excel.

 

[durangoGreg]

You can use anything that provides a powered USB connection to power the 436. Even a garden variety cellphone wall charger, i.e. the little cubes that you can get for $1.99 at the 7-11 counter, work just fine.

As for Greg's.. shall we say 'energetic' ... insistence that Macs don't corrupt removable drives with their hidden files/folders, I have plenty of experience in fields other than with this particular scanner radio to back it up as being true (that they do corrupt). It's nice that you've found otherwise, Greg, but your experience is not true universally.

And kc2kth, the 436 has a screwball way of holding in the USB card. You have to slide the metal cover to one side and flip it open, which will then allow you to lift the card out. It doesn't slide in and out like cards do in other applications.

Just to clarify a little. I was not saying that corruption can never occur but just that the Mac was not to blame.

When using Parallels on a Mac, the user is actually running windows, the Mac OS never once mounts or touches the USB drive. Parallels mounts the USB drive using a generic driver for Windows.

The problem is that Uniden's firmware or the USB hardware is somehow conflicting with Parallels standard USB driver. Parallels is pretty good and rarely conflicts with standard hardware but there is something in the Uniden USB hardware that is causing the problem.

This has nothing to do with the Mac. In fact, the user could make a dual boot Mac, install windows on the Mac machine, boot directly into windows and it would be a standard PC. The problem is Parallels and other similar solutions that use the generic windows drivers which are conflicting with the Uniden USB port.

Also the Mac is the leading platform for musicians, artists, and filmmakers. They natively work seamlessly with literally 100,000's of various hardware devices through USB without a problem. In general the native apps are bullet-proof and rarely cause an issue.

I don't know what your specific issue was but to say there is a "long history of Macs corrupting SD Cards" is completely false.

 

[dmaria]

You can use anything that provides a powered USB connection to power the 436. Even a garden variety cellphone wall charger, i.e. the little cubes that you can get for $1.99 at the 7-11 counter, work just fine.

As for Greg's.. shall we say 'energetic' ... insistence that Macs don't corrupt removable drives with their hidden files/folders, I have plenty of experience in fields other than with this particular scanner radio to back it up as being true (that they do corrupt). It's nice that you've found otherwise, Greg, but your experience is not true universally.

And kc2kth, the 436 has a screwball way of holding in the USB card. You have to slide the metal cover to one side and flip it open, which will then allow you to lift the card out. It doesn't slide in and out like cards do in other applications.

I had my SD card currupted (436) while running the Butel software in serial mode. The scanner crashed sometime in the night and the SD card died. I blame this one purely on Uniden. Paul may claim the serial port id not supported "at this time", but they did release the drivers and left access to the scanner via the startup menu which says to me that they considered it ready to go.

I downloaded SDFormatter for Windows and it would not recognize the card. Using the same card reader, I used the Mac and it formatted just fine (SDFormatter is available in a Mac version also). I find it a bit ironic that the Mac could fix it, but Windows could not. By your reasoning, the Mac should have broken it - not fixed it. Issuing blanket statements that Macs will corrupt SD cards is simply not true. I wonder why they put an SD reader on the Back of my iMac and on the side of my MacBook Pro? Mmmmm......

 

[Jay911]

This is the last I'm going to contribute toward the "Macs do/don't corrupt filesystems" part of this conversation:

I have a number of devices with storage that shows up as a removable drive when plugged into either a PC or a Mac computer. These range from typical flash drives to devices embedded in proprietary hardware that essentially have the same function as a flash drive. The "drive" observes all the standards (ISO, etc) of removable media.

When connected to a Mac computer, the Mac merrily writes .DS_Store and ._* (where * is equal to an existing legitimate file) to the drive.

Many devices don't handle these extraneous files well. Some devices, like picture frames, assume that all files are images, and try to display .DS_Store and other such things, and get confused. Other devices behave even less nicely.

The fact of the matter is that Apple should not be writing these files to what is supposed to be standards-based, interoperable formatted media. Just as Windows should not be writing "Thumbs.db" (for picture thumbnail images) in the same situation.

Simple, factual, irrefutable statement: When an Apple computer writes files to a piece of removable media, from the simple action of mounting the media on the computer, and the resulting files leave the media unusable in the host device, that means that the Apple computer has rendered the card "corrupted", at least for the purposes of the host device, even if the media passes integrity checks and is otherwise unharmed.




As for the SD cards in the x36 radios themselves, I never did use the stock card that was delivered with the radio. I use the Sandisk Ultra microSDHC class 10 32GB exclusively, and have never had data corruption of any kind at all.

 

[durangoGreg]

This is the last I'm going to contribute toward the "Macs do/don't corrupt filesystems" part of this conversation:

I have a number of devices with storage that shows up as a removable drive when plugged into either a PC or a Mac computer. These range from typical flash drives to devices embedded in proprietary hardware that essentially have the same function as a flash drive. The "drive" observes all the standards (ISO, etc) of removable media.

When connected to a Mac computer, the Mac merrily writes .DS_Store and ._* (where * is equal to an existing legitimate file) to the drive.

Many devices don't handle these extraneous files well. Some devices, like picture frames, assume that all files are images, and try to display .DS_Store and other such things, and get confused. Other devices behave even less nicely.

The fact of the matter is that Apple should not be writing these files to what is supposed to be standards-based, interoperable formatted media. Just as Windows should not be writing "Thumbs.db" (for picture thumbnail images) in the same situation.

Simple, factual, irrefutable statement: When an Apple computer writes files to a piece of removable media, from the simple action of mounting the media on the computer, and the resulting files leave the media unusable in the host device, that means that the Apple computer has rendered the card "corrupted", at least for the purposes of the host device, even if the media passes integrity checks and is otherwise unharmed.




As for the SD cards in the x36 radios themselves, I never did use the stock card that was delivered with the radio. I use the Sandisk Ultra microSDHC class 10 32GB exclusively, and have never had data corruption of any kind at all.

I don't know why your particular Mac would do such a thing? It must be an old machine with an obsolete OS. Are you running a beta OS X 10.1?

Modern Macs do not write any such file to previously formatted USB drives or any previously formatted drive. They use a standard journaled unix file system and don't write anything to a previously formatted drive. They can mount fat file systems and NT file system and don't use any .DS_Store file on a Windows formatted drive. The only time a .DS_Store is placed on a drive is when it is formatted with Mac OS extended.

I have been a developer for 35 years. I have written software for Unix, Windows, and Mac OS. I am still amazed at the amount of FUD and misinformation that is spread about Mac OS from Windows users.

 

[kd7eir]

I don't know why your particular Mac would do such a thing? It must be an old machine with an obsolete OS. Are you running a beta OS X 10.1?

Modern Macs do not write any such file to previously formatted USB drives or any previously formatted drive. They use a standard journaled unix file system and don't write anything to a previously formatted drive. They can mount fat file systems and NT file system and don't use any .DS_Store file on a Windows formatted drive. The only time a .DS_Store is placed on a drive is when it is formatted with Mac OS extended.

I have been a developer for 35 years. I have written software for Unix, Windows, and Mac OS. I am still amazed at the amount of FUD and misinformation that is spread about Mac OS from Windows users.

OS X 10.9.3 running on a 27" late 2013 3.5GHz intel Core i7 just wrote the .DS_Store to a 32gb SD card fresh out of my BCD436HP which I can assure you was NOT formatted MAC OS Extended, that was simply plugged into the system, so I call FUD on your "must be an old machine with an obsolete OS." BTW - This system writes the same thing to my Windows drives when I access them remotely from the Mac.

.DS_Store files impose additional burden on revision control process: They are prone to changes and therefore appear in commits unless specifically excluded.

Another common issue is that .DS_Store files are included in archives (such as ZIP) created by OS X users, along with other hidden files and directories. This can potentially cause problems when the archive structure is important.

By default, Finder creates a .DS_Store file in every folder that it accesses, even folders on remote systems (for example, folders shared over an SMB or AFP connection).

There are several tools that have been developed to fight .DS_Store "pollution."

Asepsis is one of them. Perhaps you can ring them up and let them know that their entire successful product is based entirely on FUD. BTW - to handle the "must be an old machine with an obsolete OS" Asepsis was recently updated to work with Mavericks. Mavericks is far from being "must be an old machine with an obsolete OS."

TinkerTool 5.0 also works with Mavericks to prevent the writing of .DS_Store "pollution" to network volumes.

Feel free to trot out your "qualifications" but the experts on this subject, Apple themselves, call BS on your assertions.

 

[fxdscon]

Modern Macs do not write any such file to previously formatted USB drives or any previously formatted drive. They use a standard journaled unix file system and don't write anything to a previously formatted drive. They can mount fat file systems and NT file system and don't use any .DS_Store file on a Windows formatted drive. The only time a .DS_Store is placed on a drive is when it is formatted with Mac OS extended.

35 years as a "developer" or not, your statement here is simply bad information, and totally untrue. And I AM a long time Mac user.

.

 

[Hit_Factor]

Can you imagine for a moment.

snip

If John is (really) lucky, he will be able to take the scanner back to the store he purchased it from and
a helpful shop assistant will provide a new SD card and re-boot the scanner for him. More than likely though, John will walk into the store and be greeted with shrugged shoulders and blanks looks.

Why do that? the warranty is with Uniden. Play fair and accept that if you want warranty service, you get what purchased with the scanner. Unless, the store advertises they warrant the sale or you BUY an extended warranty from the store.

AFAIK Uniden does not support Mac - the OP is likely wholly accountable. Personal accountability.

Why anyone thinks the store is responsible is beyond me. The store may choose to provide that customer service, but to expect it is wrong.

Finding a sd card for a couple bucks at the OP expense is the proper resolution to the problem. Then using the scanner as described in the available documentation.