Pain & suffering. Filenames on PocketBook

Source: Dev.to

Issue

I have a PocketBook e‑reader, but any filename containing non‑ASCII characters becomes gibberish when copied from a PC via USB. As a temporary workaround I zipped the files, transferred the archive, and then unzipped it on the device—this preserved the filenames.

After experimenting with rsync, cp, convmv and trying every available encoding, I discovered the cause:

• The default iocharset is iso-8859-1.
• The e‑reader’s partitions are mounted with iocharset=utf8 (both using codepage=437).

Fix

Mount the device with the correct iocharset (UTF‑8 in this case):

# Example:
sudo mount /dev/sdc /mnt --options iocharset=utf8
# Or:
sudo mount /path/to/device /path/to/mountpoint --options iocharset=utf8

If mounting with iocharset=utf8 alone doesn’t resolve the issue, you may need to inspect the current mount options. Use a console on the e‑reader (e.g., PBterm or Konsole from the Vlasovsoft apps bundle) and run:

mount

Search for your device in the output and examine the options listed in parentheses. This is how I initially identified the incorrect iocharset.