XP broke my Smartmedia card. Can I fix it?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve got two 128M smartmedia cards that, at some point, have been formatted in Windows XP. This is unfortunate since while they work fine in my card reader, they now they refuse to work in either my Olympus C40 camera, or my Nomad IIc. :frowning:

If I use either in my camera, when turned on it immediately offers to format the card, only to fail with a card error. The mp3 player doesn’t have a formatting function, it’s done from a PC application which claims to have succeeded, but in reality has not.

I’ve formatted these things using XP and 2k with disk format ‘FAT’, with Quick Format and not… I even used my Linux box to check how my working 16M card is formatted (FAT12, with 1 msdos formatted partition). Various options in fdisk and mkfs have failed me…

I have access to - a ‘HotReader’ brand card reader, Linux tools, Win XP and 2k (my 98 box is acting up, so I’ll count that out for now), and the afore mentioned camera and player. Is there any way I can get these working again?

2

No clue, sorry, but I’ll bump this from page 2 for ya. Good luck. :slight_smile:
[bump]

3

Don’t do that. :wink:

4

Not the first time I’ve heard that formatting can corrupt smartmedia cards.
I’ve not had to use it, but this may be helpful.

I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it works.

5

Here you go. It looks like some good soul has had the same problem and developed a free solution.

http://www.sallyandsteve.com/

6

Thanks for the replies. I did at one point try the smprep.exe files, but got the ‘smartmedia drivers are not loaded’ error mentioned on one of the pages Shagnasty linked to. I thought it was the card, but that page blames reader hardware, so perhaps I can find someone with a compatible reader.

In the meantime, my friend wants me to help him fix the Linux kernel so it’s capable of writing SmartMedia header information (it can only read right now), so it looks like I still have some options available. :slight_smile: