Our company works with several industrial diagnostic equipment that uses CF cards as memory devices. Usually we take out the cards and insert them in USB readers to download the data.
Any time the users format the cards on their computers, these are not recognized any more by the equipments, so we have a lot of CF cards that we can’t use. These works fine when connected to the computers or in digital cameras. As none of the equipments (data loggers, infrared cameras, video endoscopes and others) allows to format the cards, we always need to buy a new card each time a user formats it in his computer. All brand new cards are correctly recognized and work fine in every equipment.
So the question: is there any utility to format the cards leaving them in is original, brand new or factory state? We use standard 2 or 4 GB Ultra II CF cards.
GEuser - I can’t speak for the original format for the ones in question, but I’ve had to tweak formats on CF cards for embedded devices.
The first step is to understand what is getting changed - this may be as simple as FAT12/FAT16 versus FAT32, or it may be “hard drive” vs “superfloppy”.
Without having to understand the setup, you can get “dskprobe” from Microsoft (its in various Resource Kits). This allows direct access to the physical device, and you can compare the first few sectors between a good and bad card.
Under the first sector, try “view as Partition table” on both, and look for obvious differences.
If the difference is FAT32 vs FAT , then you can use Windows command-line format ( “format /FS:FAT E:” ) for example.
Another option, if you have identical CF cards, is to “clone” one to the other - There are Windows versions of the unix “DD” utility, and you’d want to use the “.\PhysicalDrive1” virtual names (which you can find in dskprobe). You can image a good card to a file, and then write that file over the non-working ones.