Basically the title. Sometimes I turn on the deck and the SD card icon is in the top bar, it shows it’s connected but doesn’t see any games on it and prompts me to format (and also shows it only has 30mb of space). Rebooting and/or removing and reinserting the SD card seems to fix it until the next time. I’m really not sure why, unless the card is failing and I need a new one? This happened on both my old lcd and the new oled deck so I don’t think it’s the port. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Sounds like a dying SD card to me.
You should already have this solved by logic. You swapped steam decks and it’s still doing this, and you’ve seen virtually no one ever complain about this with their steam decks.
It’s the card. If you haven’t already, I would give reformatting it a try. If it ever does it again after that, throw it away.
This happens when the SD card gets unmounted by the OS for some reason. If the same SD card keeps unmounting, that could either be a catastrophic file system error that makes the OS throw its hands up and say “fuck it, I’m out”, or it could be a damaged SD card.
Try going into desktop mode and running a file system check on the card. I believe the tool is called “KDE partition manager”, you’ll be able to find it in the KDE menu. From there, select the SD card, unmount it (partition -> unmount), check it (partition -> check), hit the apply button, and wait. If everything checks out, mount te partition again (either through the menu or by removing the card and putting it back in).
If you can catch it happening, you can go to desktop mode and collect logs (I think there’s a GUI tool for that, but if not:
sudo dmesg -T > logs.txtwill dump the logs in a text file). Most of those logs will be useless to you, but if you can find the moment it disconnected, you may be able to find error messages that can point you in the right directions.Some SD cards don’t like some readers, especially the cheaper cards. These things run tiny operating systems on their 200MHz+ CPUs built into the storage device themselves, and everything that runs code can have bugs or mistakes. You may be able to use the card on everything else without any issues, but run into conflicts on the Deck; there’s not a lot you can do about that. I had a card like that, that didn’t like Realtek SD card readers but read fine on every other brand.
When the card doesn’t mount properly, how does it show up in desktop mode?
I had a different SD card issue where the deck was automounting my sdcard at a different mount point, which was preventing it from seeing any of the installed games. Ultimately I just changed my mount points/library locations to match how the Deck wanted everything mounted.
This is not an SD card issue – I think it is SteamOS related
I was one of the few to get my hands on the SteamDeck OLED before Valve stable released SteamOS 3.5.x, and every time it would boot with the SD pre-inserted, it would complain my SD card wasn’t formatted (quick removal and re-insert fixed the issue); however, my Steam Deck LCD did not have this problem until I eventually updated it to SteamOS 3.5.x
