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Anyone have experience of CF cards dying?

  • 03-09-2003 2:18pm
    #1
    Inspector Gadget
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,393 ✭✭✭


    Hi folks:

    Quick question. I've been asked to try and "do something" with a 512MB CompactFlash card that suddenly stopped working.

    Apparently, the owner was playing music from it on his Zaurus (SL-5500) when all of a sudden the machine hung, and when he rebooted the CF card wouldn't mount.

    Fair enough, said I, let's have a look and see what's wrong (assuming some form of damage to the data on the disk, such as partition tables and so on). Tried formatting it (was formatted FAT beforehand), no joy. The Windows format tool wasn't even sure of its initial capacity - a bad sign, on reflection.

    Had a look in Disk Management and it recognised it correctly size-wise - tried to format it from there, again it died near the end.

    Then, had a look at it with linux FDISK - the DOS one won't support USB devices without a lot of messing. Tried to write a new partition table and create a single primary partition on it. All appeared to work fine, except nothing actually got written to the disk.

    I assume it's knackered? I'm surprised as it was running at the time of failure, so it's prob. not static or something; the owner swears it hasn't gotten hot/sat on/bent/exposed to large EM fields (including X-Rays).

    Any insight, preferably qualified with some prior experience, would be gratefully recieved.
    Gadget


Comments

  • #2
    str8_away
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 629 ✭✭✭str8_away


    Hi there,

    I had PQI 256 died on me before. What happened was PDA run out of power, while it is accessing data on the CF card.

    After that my PC does not even reconise the card when used USB CF card reader.

    What I did was send it back to PQI in Taiwan and they send it back to me 2 weeks later. No charge only postage to them.

    They told me all it need was "LOW LEVEL FORMAT". I tried to ask them for the software or how they did it, but they told me they canot give me the software. :(


    Do you know how to do a lowlevel format?


  • #3
    Inspector Gadget
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,393 ✭✭✭Inspector Gadget


    Running out of juice was the first thing I suspected here, but he swears blind that power wasn't a problem, and that except for the card he could keep using the PDA afterward.

    Will investigate low-level format... maybe my home PC can do it if it supports USB drives in the BIOS...

    Cheers,
    Gadget


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