IMAGEMATE COMPACTFLASH READER....NEED HELP

[thomas_mcnamara]

<p>posted some questions several months back, recieved lots of responses...but no luck with trouble i'am having. a while back i purchased a used canon eos d30 that takes a compact flash card type 1 or 2. bought an inexpensive cf reader first time, did not work maybe because it was cheap in price. just recently purchased online a brand new usb 2.0 compact flash card reader/writer. minimum requirements for this reader is either windows 98 me 2000 xp. i have windows os 7. pc said to me that device installed successfully, i also see reader in my devices, but when i right click to browse files i get nothing, absolutely nothing. i am sure i doing everything right, then i could be wrong, item had no directions, so i just connected usb to device then usb on pc. any help would be very much appreciated. this is a real pain.</p>

[lrblackburn]

<p>Thomas, If you right click on the drive then select Properties - On the General tab you should be able to see the total 'Capacity" of the CF card, the 'Used space' and the 'Free space'. Do those numbers match up with what you know the card to be?</p><div></div>

[dave_thomas8]

<p>I was just looking at some card reader/backup devices yesterday. If the one you're talking about is <a href="http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?N=10810152&InitialSearch=yes&sts=pi">this one</a>, it has mixed reviews and one of the significant areas of complaint seems to be a flimsy mechanical design in the CF card slot which has led to misalignment and bent pins and such. So it sounds as though one needs to be very careful when inserting a CF card. (SD cards have a more forgiving interface.)</p>

[Spearhead]

<p>It's definitely not that one based on the OP, which says it's USB 2.0. That one is USB 3.0.</p>

<p>What may be an issue is the age of the reader. It's odd that it specifies operating systems that are over fifteen years old and barely in use. I suspect that the reader is incompatible, regardless of what OS messages you get, or the reader is old enough that it has some limitations on card size.</p>

[dave_thomas8]

<p>Whoops! You're right Jeff. I spent a bunch of time on the B&H site yesterday and when I saw this, plugged in "imagemate" and didn't pay much attention to specs. In spite of admonitions here, I normally download from my camera, and the current desktop has card reader slots built in.</p>

<p>For the OP: I just tried an elderly ScanDisk CF reader I've had since maybe 2005 or so in this Win 7x64 system (maybe for the first time). On the back it says it's a model SDDR-91, part number 20-90-00091. The device shows up <strong>without</strong> a card in it as "ImageMate CF" in the devices display. As I suspected, an empty reader showing as a device just indicates physical USB communication is established. When I do plug in a card (a 4GB CF from my EOS40D), AutoPlay pops up and I can choose to "Open folder to view files with Windows Explorer." And in that state, browse files in the devices display also works. Without a card, browse files shows no options. That gets back to the suspicion the reader is not seeing, or at least properly communicating with the card. How big is the card - as Jeff suggests, that could possibly be a problem.</p>

<p>(If you put the card back in the camera, can you view images?)</p>

<p>That exhausts my guesses.</p>