Help ........my 16gb sandisk cannot be accessed

[gops009]

Help ........my 16gb sandisk cannot be accessed.cannot be formatted on camera nor on the PC.....the card was on my canon camera had given it to a friend for use on his nikon as  his card was full we were shooting at the same venue .now cannot format nor can use it help what should i do..

[Brendon]

Strange, Give us some more info please like what message you get when trying to access photos on the PC, whether you can access the photos on the camera or on the pc or on your friends pc etc.

Did you try formating on your friends PC ?

I don't find any reason why one card inserted in a different camera will cause the card to stop working anywhere else.

[CosmiC]

This might sound silly but check if it is locked through Lock switch on the card..can't think of anything else at the moment...

[gops009]

Strange, Give us some more info please like what message you get when trying to access photos on the PC, whether you can access the photos on the camera or on the pc or on your friends pc etc.

Did you try formating on your friends PC ?

I don't find any reason why one card inserted in a different camera will cause the card to stop working anywhere else.

when i attach the  card to my PC message i get is format drive K earlier it used to show canon and when i try to format message is windows cannot format this card and cannot access it on camera tried it on my friends camera too message i got is card corrupt or damaged. 

[Hellwrath]

I have had a similar problem. The problem happens only with 16gb card for me. I used to try to read the card off card reader and it wouldn't. Finally, I found the easiest solution. Inserted the card in the camera and connected it to my laptop. My computer could detect that. Try it if you have been trying it with a card reader.

[gops009]

This might sound silly but check if it is locked through Lock switch on the card..can't think of anything else at the moment...

checked it too

[gops009]

I have had a similar problem. The problem happens only with 16gb card for me. I used to try to read the card off card reader and it wouldn't. Finally, I found the easiest solution. Inserted the card in the camera and connected it to my laptop. My computer could detect that. Try it if you have been trying it with a card reader.

Been trying with a card reader...let me try with the camera connected to the PC..haven't tried the camera with the pc hope nothing goes wrong .

[rollno22]

R.I.P card..

[Hankosaurus]

Ouch.

Really sorry about that difficulty. That surely does drive home the importance of backups, and short intervals between them. Losing a card is a pain. But losing one's pictures is the pits. I try to get my images out to backup storage every session or every 100 frames or so. One never knows when a storage device will enter The Great Beyond.

That is one area where the film negative has an advantage over digital. A negative can be re-scanned. Vapor cannot.

[Bharat Varma]

One camera can (and occasionally does) screw up a card formatted in another camera. The screw up may well be bad enough to then render the card in a state when it cannot be formatted on a pc using a card reader. Happened to me just a couple of days ago.

Two options -

The simplest one is to insert it into the camera with which you intend to use it and run a full format on it through the camera menu itself. This worked for me.

The second option is to download a utility from the card manufacturer's site and run diagnostics and/or format from that utility.

Let us know if either of these worked.

[gops009]

One camera can (and occasionally does) screw up a card formatted in another camera. The screw up may well be bad enough to then render the card in a state when it cannot be formatted on a pc using a card reader. Happened to me just a couple of days ago.

Two options -

The simplest one is to insert it into the camera with which you intend to use it and run a full format on it through the camera menu itself. This worked for me.

The second option is to download a utility from the card manufacturer's site and run diagnostics and/or format from that utility.

Let us know if either of these worked.

Hi bharat i did try to format the card on my friends camera and mine too no results but i  did go to the dealer from whom i had bought the card from he says extreme card does give problem he replaced the card with a Ultra 16gb 30mbs @10 card he says i will thank him for that he says its better than extreme though if i am not happy with this card he will give me a extreme card in replacement i used the ultra yesterday seems fine will check again 2morrow morning or else will go back and take the extreme 16gb.

[gops009]

R.I.P card..

yes sir very short life....16gb extreme 30mb/s @10...... R.I.P card.

[gops009]

Ouch.

Really sorry about that difficulty. That surely does drive home the importance of backups, and short intervals between them. Losing a card is a pain. But losing one's pictures is the pits. I try to get my images out to backup storage every session or every 100 frames or so. One never knows when a storage device will enter The Great Beyond.

That is one area where the film negative has an advantage over digital. A negative can be re-scanned. Vapor cannot.

Agree with u Hankosaurus....i think  in future might will just keep buying less gb cards maybe 4 or 8gb at least in a situation like will have some data left of the event.

[amitk26]

Agree with u Hankosaurus....i think  in future might will just keep buying less gb cards maybe 4 or 8gb at least in a situation like will  have some data left of the event.

Buy less speed IMHO failure rates are high in high speed cards.
 , For most Cameras Class 10 is sufficient ( Class 6 for stills)  and you actually do not need any thing which outperforms 10 mbps sustained read - write. Check the manual of card and see what speed is recommended. Anything above the max burst rate of your camera is just a number.

A higher peak r/w speed is not an indication of better performance always.  For some applications such as Android mobiles where you want to install apps on SD card actually Class 4 works better because non-sequential access speed is most of the times better in Class 4 because in Class 10 and above manufacturers maximize the sequential R/W  to highest and random R/W may not be that good.

[Brendon]

I dunno but I have a differing view. I generally choose high performance memory only. I try to stay away from low priced memory.

So far I have had 4 CF cards - 2 high performance (Kingston 266x and Sandisk 133x) and 2 low end Kingston cards. Both low end Kingston cards have failed and no longer work. Both Kingston and Sandisk 133x cards are still going strong even after 2.5 years for the Kingston and 2 years for the Sandisk.

Similarly for SD cards I have seen 4 cheap cards fail - 3 Kingston and 1 Sandisk. Gops card was the first Sandisk extreme I have seen fail but of course it doesn't mean that they do not just that I haven't personally seen any fail.

My reasoning is that Class 4 and class 6 cards are generally not very consistent. Most manufacturers use whatever cheap memory chips they can get their hands on. Performance memory generally forces manufacturers to use only a certain memory type to get consistent performance.

I have used the bundled Sony class 4 card that came with my camera and it was noticeably slower than the Memory stick pro duo HG that I purchased later. Similarly I used a friends D90 with a class 4 card and the darn thing would practically hang after clicking 4 - 5 shots in quick succession.

[amitk26]

My reasoning is that Class 4 and class 6 cards are generally not very consistent. Most manufacturers use whatever cheap memory chips they can get their hands on. Performance memory generally forces manufacturers to use only a certain memory type to get consistent performance.

Brandon ji while your personal experience is valid , In general why I said to buy lower speed matured cards rather then latest greatest has some logic.

Most Card manufacturers do not use their own in-house flash they source it from big OEMs ( Samsung, Toshiba etc.) and repackage in to a card , The card has a micro-controller and bundled embedded software.

The underlying raw flash memory is never accessed directly by the device , The card manufacturer bundles a layer of flash translation layer (software) which implements a basic flash file system which sits below user file systems like FAT16,FAT32, NTFS, EXT4 etc.
Memory cards like SD/MMC/Memory Stick have a controller which runs the low level  FFS algorithms , The job of this layer is to evens out the write cycle so that same locations are not rewritten over and over to prevent wear.

Every OEM and card manufacturer tries to play with this software to achieve max score . Big players have their own proprietary solutions like Samsung has RFS ( slow as it is designed for robustness rather then speed) and Sandisk has it's own ExtremeFFS which maximizes the random write performance compared to other flash file systems.


Most of the time it is same flash memory in Class 6 and  Class 10 and Class 10 + ( SD association did not define anything above 10 and moved to UHS1 straight)  and this flash translation and protocol above decieds the speed.

So if cards are going bad 95% of the times it is due to the controller software bundled by the card manufacturer to maximize speed some things need to be sacrificed at times.

This however does not mean that slower older cards can not have buggy software but chances are that in new releases of old devices these bugs are patched.

[gops009]

Ok guys a Article in Better Photography April 2012 on how to take care of Memory cards page 96.....if u have borrowed a media card ...u need to be more careful...especially if they use a different camera...not formatting the card before usage can result in corrupt data.... 
I had lent  the card to my friend and it was not formatted...so maybe that's the reason my card got corrupted.

ANYWAYS NOW I AM IN A BIGGER DILEMMA....The card has been replaced by the dealer...but instead of the sandisk Extreme 16gb 30mb/s @10 he has replaced it with   sandisk Ultra 16gb 30mb/s @ 10 saying it will work better than the extreme...i have't found any ultra 16gb 30mb/s @ 10 anywhere on the net yet for reviews....any one having any idea is this ultra good or how do i test the speed....or should i just go back to the dealer and demand a extreme 16 GB in replacement.

Regards 

[amitk26]

Gops if the problem is due to card not being formatted in another camera then it is always be fixed by low level format in the camera you want to use the card. Also before formatting you can recover the images by using software such as Recouva on PC by a USB Card reader.

However physical damage to card is unrecoverable.

You can test the card with software at following link ( download from the link given on the page)

http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/h2testw-14-gold-standard-in-detecting-usb-counterfeit-drives/

[Brendon]

I think your dealer is referring to this card here - http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Ultra-SDHC-Class-SDSDU-016G-U46/dp/B007BJHETS/ref=sr_1_13?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1333461960&sr=1-13

However I find a little too many negative remarks about the card for it to be down to a few lemons in a batch.

If you read the Sandisk Extreme SDHC page, you will see majorly positive reviews with very few lemons.

[Hankosaurus]

Hi Guys.

Is there some correlation between card shuttling and reliability? It seems to me that a number of stories I read about card failure are coincident with having moved the cards in and out of cameras.

The story above of how a card was corrupted by simply moving it between brands is disheartening.

I bought a Kingston CF 16GB elite pro 133x card when I bought my D700 almost three years ago. So far, no problems with it. But I transfer the data with the USB cable, not with the little card reader gizmo which I bought and have used but once since. I read about how that some folks were bending pins in their cameras by mishandling their CF cards, and decided that there is no reason to take that risk if I'm not in a big hurry to move data about.

I have also wondered about putting one's CF card into some other device. Consider those photo processing kiosks in stores. What with people coming and going all the time, how can one know the health of those slots and the pins at the dark end of them?  If one puts his CF card into one, is it possible that a fatigued pin might break off inside one's CF card? Then, if not noticed, it seems to me that one might unknowingly bend pins in his camera when trying to reinsert the same damaged card into his camera.

I've reasoned that if I don't move the card, then I don't run those risks. And besides, the storage capacity of a 16G card is far greater than any roll of film I ever shot. I will get a second card as a backup, but I am not yet inclined to swap the two in and out all the time if I can avoid it.

Frankly, I think the form factor of the CF card is flawed. Terminal equipment, whether telephony, audio, video, or photo, should not have pins for connectors inside the endpoint equipment. That should be inside the cables, which are easily replaced. The phone company had this right all along, but the data industry popularized the bad habit of doing it wrong. The cards which have no pins and no need for them seem like a better idea to me. Like those little cards that go into your cellphone, for example.