Compact Flash Cards (being rendered unusable)

For people with technical questions about their CFFA Interface card. You can use this forum to communicate with me and with other CFFA users. If you are posting a problem, please be as detailed as possible, including any necessary sequence needed to cause the problem, your system information and any error messages.

Moderator: rich

Postby tolsen64 » Sat Mar 08, 2003 6:32 pm

I had a PNY 32MB CF Card in my digital camera. Worked great. I decided to try it out in the CFFA Card. Worked great there. Loaded GSOS, copied on & off, etc. Then I went to put it back in my camera and the camera can't format it now. The CF seems to be unusable now for the camera. I put the CF in my PC's CF reader/writer. I formatted the card and can read/write to it on the PC...but I can't get it to work with the camera anymore...now I need to go buy a virgin CF for my camera...
tolsen64
 
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Postby rich » Mon Mar 10, 2003 11:02 am

tolsen64,

It is very likely that there is nothing wrong with your CF card. But the camera can't recognize the partition information on it. Remember that under ProDOS & GS/OS, the sector (LBA block 0) is overwritten, and not used as it would be on a PC (or camera). If you want to go back to using it in your camera, it will need a valid MBR before the camera will format a partition. Normally this is done by booting from a Floppy on a PC and running FDISK /mbr, but that will always operates on Disk 0 (your main HD) so unless you install your CF card in a CF-to-IDE converter and install it as master drive 0, you will not be able to use fdisk /mbr to rewrite the Master Boot Record (MBR). That is what I had to do to get the MBR restored on one of my CF cards, but I have a converter board, so it was relatively simple.

For more info on Microsoft's FDISK see:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... -US;Q69013
or
http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/asm/mbr/FDISK.htm
_________________
Thanks,
Rich


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: rich on 2003-03-10 11:54 ]</font>
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Postby Brian Patrie » Tue Nov 29, 2005 2:44 pm

Regarding using fdisk to write a master boot record (MBR) to a drive other than the first, see my Note about restoring Micro,soft FAT MBR with fdisk.
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