Compact Flash Cards (being rendered unusable)

[tolsen64]

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...

[rich]

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>

[Brian Patrie]

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.