SM suddenly not working

I have a 32MB SM card that I have used for the last year. I mostly use my pair of 64MB SM cards. A few days ago I put the 32MB in and the camera I got a screen about formatting it. I said yes and then got a card error. I cannot read this card with the camera, my PCMCIA adaptor in my laptor, my sandisk USB reader or on the DW. I guess somehow the format got screwed. Any suggesstions as to how to bring this puppy back to life. I have no other devices that use SM. If not, no great loss as 32MBs are cheap and I am looking at a 128 anyway.

Thanks
Dennis

When this happens to me with my two Olympus cameras, I pump the card in and out with the camera turned on until the error goes away.

Dennis Lathem said:

I have a 32MB SM card that I have used for the last year. I mostly
use my pair of 64MB SM cards. A few days ago I put the 32MB in and
the camera I got a screen about formatting it. I said yes and then
got a card error. I cannot read this card with the camera, my
PCMCIA adaptor in my laptor, my sandisk USB reader or on the DW. I
guess somehow the format got screwed. Any suggesstions as to how
to bring this puppy back to life. I have no other devices that use
SM. If not, no great loss as 32MBs are cheap and I am looking at a
128 anyway.

Thanks
Dennis

Click to expand...

Jim T said:

When this happens to me with my two Olympus cameras, I pump the
card in and out with the camera turned on until the error goes away.

Click to expand...

Sounds brutal, but "Whatever Works". Best, Geoff.

I have had this problem several times over the past two years and never could find an answer. The card looks fine, and will store files in my computer (using a PC card SmartMedia Adapter) but would not work in the camera. Kept saying "card error" when I tried to format in my Oly C2000Z. Simple Tech has REPLACED three cards for me because of this problem. I have talked to their tech support and read this forum until I was totally frustrated.

Tonight I solved it!!!! I went out and bought a Micortech ZIO USB reader from CompUSA for $29.99. It includes a program called smprep.exe to reformat SmartMedia. I used it to reformat three "bad" cards in just a couple of minutes - an old 8 mb card that I gave up on two years ago, a 32 mb card and a 64 mb card. They all work perfectly now.

What I don't understand, is why is it that the tech support people at SimpleTech and Olympus don't know about this!!!!

Geoffrey Thornber said:

Jim T said:

When this happens to me with my two Olympus cameras, I pump the
card in and out with the camera turned on until the error goes away.

Click to expand...

Sounds brutal, but "Whatever Works". Best, Geoff.

Click to expand...

I have never had to use the smprep to recover from SM errors. Always rebooted the SM cards in the field using the hot pump method. But I have used the smprep with my Sandisk card reader to convert my non-Olympus SM media to be Olympus pano capable. Noce to know I can change my generic cards to take full advantage of my 3030 camera functions. In other words the smprep software is handy in many ways.

Dave said:

Tonight I solved it!!!! I went out and bought a Micortech ZIO USB
reader from CompUSA for $29.99. It includes a program called
smprep.exe to reformat SmartMedia. I used it to reformat three
"bad" cards in just a couple of minutes - an old 8 mb card that I
gave up on two years ago, a 32 mb card and a 64 mb card. They all
work perfectly now.

What I don't understand, is why is it that the tech support people
at SimpleTech and Olympus don't know about this!!!!

Geoffrey Thornber said:

Jim T said:

When this happens to me with my two Olympus cameras, I pump the
card in and out with the camera turned on until the error goes away.

Click to expand...

Sounds brutal, but "Whatever Works". Best, Geoff.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...