CF card problem/question

[tdj]

Hey everyone<br>I was shooting a wedding last night, and the equipment

in question is a D-70 with a 1 GB Lexar pro card. Into the reception,

I took a shot, and looked at the LCD, and it said "This card cannot be

used." Slight panic set in, and I put the card into the case, and put

in another. At the office last night, I put the card in the reader,

and it said "card not formatted." I ran the Lexar image recovery

software, and thankfully all the images were recovered. Could anyone

shed light on what caused this to happen? Could the card have had a

sector go bad? I'm very thankful for the Image Rescue software... it

was a nerve racking hour while it worked it's magic, though. It even

recovered images from the previous weekends' wedding, that were erased

and the card had been formatted.<br>Thanks for your help.

[sebastiandooris]

Ok deep breath now.

 

CF Card memory is not effected by bad sectors unkile microdrives and hard disk units they use semiconductors to store the information so the things that effect the file system integrity would be.

 

1. Static discharge (keep in protective covers never store in pockets)

 

2. Dust that has got inside the ment to be sealed unit and is shorting out the circuit

 

3. Mositure shorting out the circuit

 

What happens when you get the message "Unable to read" or "disk not formatted" it's because the reader cant see the part of the disk called the TOC/FAT (Table of contents/File allocation table) recovery software finds the raw file information and recreated the TOC/FAT.

 

 

Seb (Ireland)

[bennyboy]

Consider yourself lucky, my 1GB Lexar card died unceremoniously whilst in camera yesterday. I took some shots, turned off, switched back on and got 'CF ERR' on the display. The card causes both my CF readers to lock up. Fortunately I'm not a pro photographer so only lost some personal photos, but it's still a complete pain, at least Lexar agreed to RMA the card.

[petra_s.]

This is getting scary, I had a lot of my photographer friends tell me that their lexar cards are getting the same thing, but I had the same happen to me with SanDisk. I thought it was because I switched the card from a 20D to a 5D, but I did reformated it when I put it in the 5D. Strange......... I did get my pictures back with the recovery program.

[gaetano catelli]

is there a 20D-specific CF memory card recovery program?

[savagesax]

Please help--- I use Nikons D2X's and my partner uses Canons. I've noticed that recently only Canon people are having issues with cf cards. Am I wrong? Hope so! Is this true? Are there any Nikon people having major issues? Just thought I should bring this up in case there are problems with Canon, or problems with the card makers supporting Canon. Needless to say it is not fun shooting a wedding and coming home empty!

 

Thanks,

Bob

[petra_s.]

I hate to tell you D.J. when I had my d2h the same thing happened to me all the time. I guess nothing is perfect. All I can say is that I have been using Kingston 45x cards lately and they seem to be more stable (knock on wood) ...........

[ShunCheung]

Bob, most of the card problems are inside the memory cards themselves. You can put the card in a Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Leica, Hasselbald ... camera and you may run into problems. That is why people prefer to have multiple shooters and multiple cameras.

[ashley_f]

I had a TwinMos 2 gig card for my 30d and two weeks ago i had the CF Err message on my camera as well. I downloaded a program called PC Inspector Smart Recovery. If you type that into google you will come up with the website and you can dl the newest version. It took a couple of hours to go through my card but it recovered all of my files with no problems.

[gerund]

Sometimes you can clear an error readout by rebooting(turning the camera off and back on again). I got an error on my SanDisk 1 gb CF card today and cleared it by hitting the off switch and turning back on.