I just read through the threads, and will offer another opinion,
from another perspective and experience. I am an IT manager and
have seen this problem more than several times before with both
flash and usb "drives", and in my opinion has nothing to do with
the camera (at least not in the way you are expressing).
In all of the instances that we experienced data loss on these
types of devices, the "host" device was on, and/or the transfer was
not finished when removed, or the person couldn't remember for sure
if the host was on. In this scenario, the FAT (File Allocation
Table for non-computer geeks) itself gets corrupted, either to the
point of complete unreadability or in your case, partially (you can
still see the filename entries with size info). So if that did in
fact occur, the files would be written to the card, but the FAT
would incorrectly locate the start byte, or offset, rendering the
files useless, or partially unreadable. Reformatting the media will
usaully correct the issue, but I have seen where lower level "disk"
fix utlities needed to fix media descriptors to make the card/usb
drive work again.
I personally do not practice what the collective opinions on this
thread do - I DO NOT use a card reader whenever possible so that I
am sure I will not inadvertantly corrupt the FAT either when
removing card from the camera to reader, and then AGAIN when
removing card from the PC.
It seems to be a relatively small percentage of times that this
error occurs, considering the amount of times these devices are
moved from host to host, but it only has to happen once with
important data, for you to re-assess the practice.
For the incidents that I was able to identify the scenerio, the
problem had almost ALWAYS occured on the PC side rather than the
other host (once on a WindowsCe PDA side) so I would suggest it is
probably Windows mashing the FAT, and not the camera.
-Lackosleep
P.S. Dad, I'll talk to you when I land.
