There is another thread on the Board I read about 2 hours ago regarding a Flat Stanley take-pictures-of-him-in-your-exotic-locale project someone is doing.
Since I read the thread, I have been hard at work downloading recovery software, card reader drivers, anything to try to make the danged card work. It won’t format in the reader, and it won’t format in the camera. When I try to open it in either the pc or the camera, they freeze up. Only removing the card releases the freeze.
I have two theories: either
a) sometimes memory cards are just past it, and I am SOL, or
b) the card somehow knows that Oakland, CA is not an exotic locale, and is mutiny-ing.
Don’t ever format cards in a reader connected to your computer. That can easily destroy them for good. On;y format in the camera itself. It shouldn’t be too expensive to get a new one. Just trash it and move on/
A quick Amazon search on SD memory card brings up a 2Gig San Disk card for $7.05.
That is pretty close to disposable in my book.
ETA: a 1 Gb card from the same people is $2.50
Memory is dirt cheap these days, and cards are basically commodities. There’s no point IMO in buying anything smaller then 2G at this point.
Formatting a card in the computer won’t destroy it, but it may change the file system on the card and your camera will no longer recognize it. If your only use for the cards is in your camera, this is a bad thing. You may have to manually reformat the card using formatting tools to get it to the point where the camera will recognize it. This is why you should only format (or even delete files) in the camera if that is the card’s main use.
All might not be lost. There are a variety of free recovery tools that use different techniques so try them all. Did you clean the contacts on the card? Did you make sure the write protection tab is deactivated?
No cite is needed for facts. It may be possible for an expert to recover a flash card after a computer format but it is way too much work for the casual user to go through to fix a $30 card.
Sorry, but that’s moronic. If I format my hard drive, I may need to have an expert recover the data for me, but I haven’t “destroyed” the drive itself.
With SD cards, the controller is on the card not the camera. A card that accepts SD will work on SD up to 2G. If the card accepts SDHC it will work at least up to 8G.
Anecdata: I have a pocket PC that did behave very oddly with a 2gig memory card. It wouldn’t refuse the card completely, but it seemed to have problems seeing the ‘second half’ - I’m not sure if it reported the external memory size as 1 gig, but it would fail to save new files when there was still 600 megs or more free, and would have problems reading files on the back section that had been written there through a card reader. That may be something different than what you’re talking about.
Experience - I had a SmartMedia card appear to fail, and I put it into the card reader on my desktop PC and let Norton DiskDoctor (or whatever Norton calls their Disk repair these days) work on it. The card has been working since, both with my Olympus C70 camera and the card reader on the PC.
Experience - I bought a PNY memory card and had a SanDisk reader, and the card appeared not to work. I took them back to Best Buy. Though I didn’t ask, a clerk said that card and card reader manufacturers code the manufacturer into their devices, and some card readers claim the card is defective if they detect that their competitor made it. This sounds like a horribly dishonest and Machiavellian business practice - in other words, if you think about it, these companies probably do stuff like this all the time because something about capitalism apparently breeds contempt for honesty. Following that line of reasoning, I changed brands on one of the devices and everything started working (though of course this does not prove the hypothesis, it is merely consistent with it).
I don’t buy that. Such myths are endemic to retail electronics, just like the earlier assertion that formatting a memory card in a computer would destroy it.
Anyway, SmartMedia (and xD) cards are “bare flash”, meaning the card just contains the flash memory. Unlike CF and SD, the controller is in the device that uses the card. So, a bug in the controller firmware or poorly written firmware could affect how the data is stored on the card, which can cause a problem if the card is placed in another device with different controller firmware. This is why using a specific manufacturer’s card reader might work better - the controller is likely to be the same or similar throughout a manufacturer’s product line.
Also, SmartMedia cards can be used in different storage schemes. This is lower level than a filesystem. My Rio PMP300 (one of the very first MP3 players) could accept SmartMedia cards for memory expansion, but the card had to have the right storage scheme to do it. A SmartMedia card designed for use in a camera wouldn’t work out of the box, but there was an unsupported way of reprogramming the storage scheme so the card would work with the Rio, and vice versa.