CF Card failure - a bit different

Hello.

I have a XF100 too and thi is another error. This camera only supports cards with UDMA 6 and UDMA7. It’s because of the internal buffer memory speed. I had to buy a Sandisk Extreme Pro for the XF100 and it works fine… till now… my Extreme Pro 32 Gb is in this “error” state that many people is complaining about on this forum. I could save half of the video clips on the card.

I’ve seen more CF card errors now, with UDMA 6 and 7 cards then the last 8 years. I have about 140GB in many different sizes and brands and never had any card error in the last 8 years… What’s wrong? Can it be an issue with Magic Lantern? Or maybe we are storaging next to our cell phones and radiation affects this new cards. Or is it just an issue with new card readers and USB 3.0 thecnology. Any ideas?

Partial solution :I had a similar problem, the card corrupted halfway through the shoot.

I used AidFile Recovery : http://www.aidfile.com/

Just a warning, the free version only recovers the first 1GB of data, for any more you need to pay the registration fee which is $69

Goodluck

My Sandisk was the same problem! I was seeing the photos with my mother it appeared there one  message, and I had no the opportunity to spend my photos elsewhere, for example to my computer! I’m sad because I lost a lot of nice picturesI’m sad because I lost a lot of nice pictures!

I had the same problem with a 16GB CF card using my Canon 7D at a wedding.  Just as the Bride was turning down the Isle the card stop working and read error…error…  When I took it out and put it in other card readers it would not get recognized at all.  I sent it to a recover company here in Michigan and they said it had nothing on it.  I know it had almost 300 images on it.  I am a professional photographer and I am always looking at what I have shot to check the lighting and manual setting.   There were images there.  I got it back and found a company through other forums on the internet that can take the chip out of the card and recover the images even if others say there is nothing there.  It is call recoverfab out of Germany.  I was a bit afraid to send a card to Germany but what did I have to loose.  It was already damaged.  I sent it about 10 days ago and got an email today that they recovered 267 images of the close to 3 hundred I had on it.  They look great.  I have checked them out on the website preview.  I will downlowd them today.  The cost was very resonable.  This was wedding footage I needed to recover for my client.  Now remember the recovery company I used here (I know the owner of this company he is a friend) could not recover them. Recoverfab saved my images.  They were great.

Similar problem for me, my 16GB card was working fine until I put it in my computer’s onboard card reader to download the photos (something I’ve done many times before). This time it did not want to read the card, so tried to re-insert it a few times, then got a message saying card needs to be formatted. Tried it in my camera again and got the same error - unformatted card. Unable to access my photos. I still wanted to recover the photos so I did not format my card. Put it in another computer, same error, saying I should format it but at least it picked up the drive, so I clicked cancel, left it in there and downloaded recovery software for $20. This worked, I found my photos and saved them, now I can probably try and reformat my card but I don’t trust it anymore. Thanks SanDisk. I don’t suppose you will reimburse me for my card and the $20 I spent on recovery software?

I just experienced this failure and wanted to share how I managed to rescue my CF card. This is kind of lengthy, but sometimes details are necessary!

  1. I downloaded the SanDisk RescuePRO DELUXE trial program: http://www.lc-tech.com/pc/sandisk-rescuepro-and-rescuepro-deluxe/

It will let you save 25 photos - there’s also a PRO DELUXE Professional version available to trial. It may possibly let you recover more. But I’m just guessing.

2, After downloading and running, it found over a thousand photos on my little 2Gig card - photos from several years ago, even though I routinely deleted pictures after each download. Most pictures were screwed up - looking at the thumbnails, there were two, sometimes three copies of each photo. The first being a full sized photo, or would have been if it wasn’t half green or half missing, a small thumbnail sized photo, and sometimes two thumbnail sized. Very few were usable and I chose not to save any of them.

I tried to simply delete them from my card, but they wouldn’t delete.

SO…

  1. Next I left the card in my card reader and opened my System Mechanic Pro and chose to scrub the drive - my CF card being in E Drive. It took about 20 minutes, but it came out clean. I think most maintenance/performance programs have a drive scrubber. It’s worth a try.

  2. Put the card back into the camera - Canon EOS Rebel XT - went to MENU and selected Format. It quickly formatted, I tested the camera by taking a few shots, downloaded them, and ta-da! everything is fine and dandy.

I hope this helps!

Mrs Berry

There are some other proficient and more advance application also available for photo Recovery. You can check out such a tool from here … 

 http://www.amrevsoftware.com/photo-recovery

I came here yesterday with TWO bad 32GB cards.
to wit:
After several hours of painstaking trial and error e.g.: changing settings in my computer bios, three different card readers at different USB speeds, thread after thread of forums, and continually trying to do the same—> format in fat32, sometimes with Fat32 not even showing up in the choices, my Windows Disk Management open and looking for the card to even show up as a disk when I plugged it in AGAIN.

 I solved the problem, for BOTH of the cards.  I took a can of compressed air ‘Blow Off Duster’ and aimed it into the little tiny holes on the card, that slide into the reader. Done, did it. Recognized it, files in folders complete, I don’t know if they will take/hold 29GB of new photos yet, but my faith says I will try it.  (Now where did I put that old 16GB card that failed me? )
sigh.  k.i.s.s.

I was having the same problem and afeared that my pictures of the Taj Mahal were toast.  I tried the canned air trick and the card reader picked up the pictures immediately.

Hi,

I’ve got a problem with my Extreme 60mb/s CF 32GB not being recognised by any PC or mac I’ve tried. I used it in a XF305 a couple of days ago, I checked the footage in camera just after I shot it and it played back ok. Since then I’ve taken the card out of the camera and it isn’t recognised in my PC or mac (I’ve tried using a USB 2 & 3 card reader)… or infact in the XF305 it was used in.

I’ve used this set up numerous times before and not had a problem, until now.

Any help would be grately appreciated!

J

***I managed a fix for my Sandisk Extreme 60/Mb 32GB, perhaps it will be helpful.

My Issue:

I had just backed up media from several identical cards, using a Kingston USB 3.0 reader and OSX Yosemite.  After backing up the media from the last card, I dumped the media and cleared the Trash Can, But the card just kept blinking.  I attemped to Eject the card, but it did not respond and just kept blinking in the reader.  After several minutes, I just removed the card and and the blinking stopped.  However, when I reinserted the card into the reader, it did not recognize it. Llike nothing was there, it just blinked.  I placed in a Canon DSLR and recived the error, “Cannot read card. Remove or reformat card.” (or something like that).  Placing the card back in the reader, it just continued to blink and not mount.  Disk Utility did not recognize the card, either. So…

My solution: (could be any combination or just dumb luck, likely the latter)

I removed the card and blew the card out, as well as the reader.  Noting no obstruction in the card holes, and no bent pins in the reader (which worked with every other card), I reinserted the card into the reader.  It began blinking and kept blinking.  I opended Disk Utility and confirmed that the card was not being rcognized (nothing showed up).  Leaving the card in and DIsk Utility open, I opened a Safari window and began looking for solutions.  After several minutes (20-30min), I notice Disk Utility prompt me with an error, stating that the volume was not readable, BUT IT DID SHOW THE CARD IT SELF IN DISK UTILITY, though it was not Mounted and not on the desktop.  Disk Utility gave me three options:  INITIALIZE, CLOSE?, IGNORE? ( I really cant’ confirm the latter two).  I chose INITIALIZE, the first option, and it allowed me to ERASE the disk and reformat.  I chose to reformat the card in  “MS-DOS (FAT)”.  After reformatting, the card mounted and showed on my desktop. The card also showed in my Camera, where I reformatted it again.

Conclusion:

For now, it seems to be working fine.  I have the card labled, so I will report back here if there is any further issue.  Hope this helps.

Hello!

I have the same experience likt the most users here and I am really angry about the “quality” of these cards!

It is my second Sandisc Ultra 32 GB that is out of order.

I was lucky enough that it did not have the failure at my layst photoshootings, but I can not rely on these products anymore.

It is a too high risk to use it in a productive procedure like taking photos for clients. It is no solution to send it back and get a new card if the containing material is not backed up by Sandisc.

I do not want to imagine the “quality” of Sandisc SSD… I am happy that I do not use it for my PC…

  This is my first time posting on an online forum but this exact same thing happened to me.  I came home from a photo session and went to upload photos and my card just wouldn’t read, I thought maybe it was my card reader but I poped in a different card in it and it read it just fine.  Panic started to set in a little when I put the card back in the camera and I got an error message prompting me to reformat the card.  I was honest with my client and told them what was going on, unfortunitly they couldn’t re-shoot the session so I felt I needed to do my best to recover the photos.  I saw this link pop up in 3 different google searches “my sandisk card won’t read”  http://recoverfab.com so I figured I would contact them and see if they thought it was possible to recover them.  I e-mailed and with in a few hours I had a responce.  It was going to be expensive for me to ship (4 day was $139, company is in Germany and I’m in US) but I decided to take a chance.  I tracked that package like it was my own child on the airplane, once it was recieved I imediatly got a message from recoveryfab, a little sigh of relief.  The message said they would send me a message the next day and when I woke up the next morning I had a message stating he had been able to recover 80% of my photos!  I’m so glad I took a chance.  If any of you NEED these photos off your cards wether they are vacation photos, holiday or client photos.  You should check out http://recoverfab.com  I will have this website saved forever.  Hope this helps some of you!

Danielle

This is my first time posting on an online forum but this exact same thing happened to me. I came home from a photo session and went to upload photos and my card just wouldn’t read, I thought maybe it was my card reader but I poped in a different card in it and it read it just fine. Panic started to set in a little when I put the card back in the camera and I got an error message prompting me to reformat the card. I was honest with my client and told them what was going on, unfortunitly they couldn’t re-shoot the session so I felt I needed to do my best to recover the photos. I saw this link pop up in 3 different google searches “my sandisk card won’t read” http://recoverfab.com so I figured I would contact them and see if they thought it was possible to recover them. I e-mailed and with in a few hours I had a responce. It was going to be expensive for me to ship (4 day was $139, company is in Germany and I’m in US) but I decided to take a chance. I tracked that package like it was my own child on the airplane, once it was recieved I imediatly got a message from recoveryfab, a little sigh of relief. The message said they would send me a message the next day and when I woke up the next morning I had a message stating he had been able to recover 80% of my photos! I’m so glad I took a chance. If any of you NEED these photos off your cards wether they are vacation photos, holiday or client photos. You should check out http://recoverfab.com I will have this website saved forever. Hope this helps some of you!
Danielle

Hi Michael,

I currently have the exact same problem, right down to the Lexar card, iMac and exact situation resulting in now an unreadable card (which tells me it needs to be initialised and or formatted).  I’m in such a panic because 3000 wedding shoot photos were on that card.  I’m curious, did you ever get your images back?

Hi Michael,

I currently have the exact same problem, right down to the Lexar card, iMac and exact situation resulting in now an unreadable card (which tells me it needs to be initialised and or formatted). I’m in such a panic because 3000 wedding shoot photos were on that card. I’m curious, did you ever get your images back?

I have been using sandisk cf cards for over 8 years with no problems until now.  When I tried to download a 64gb extreme pro it stopped after awhile and gave an error saying it could not conect to the external device, I was able to complete the download with a cf card reader, I reformated the card in the camera and it seems to work, though I don’t quite trust it, it would be disapoinitng to loose images that may not be easy to recreate. The price of cf cards has come down quite a bit but still pricey.

The card was about .25 full, I have filled 64gb to within 5 to 50 images many times without a problem.

I am wondering if there were some corrupted bits in the card and by reformating they are now excluded from the usable memory but not sure about that.  Any thoughts on wheather to keep ot toss the card.

I have an EOS 7D that I have used for many years with the Sandisk 16GB extreme pro. Recently, the compact flash card stopped working so I contacted Sandisk and they sent me a brand new one. This new one is also not being recognized by my camera it says “Change/Remove Card of format with camera” but when I try to format it with the camera it won’t let me. The card is being read by my MacBook. The weird thing is, I have a generic 2GB compact flash which works perfectly fine and is recognized by my camera. I also went by Best Buy and purchased another Sandisk card just to try it and it also didn’t work on my camera but it does on my computer. My pins on the camera are in great condition (none are bent). If anybody knows how to resolve this or has the same problem please reply.

Here the solution that worked for me by user Kaw58 on cnet forum


I ran across this post and thought I would add a comment to any future google searches.
I image Transcend IDE flash modules via Sabrent USB interface and encountered this problem.
When inserting the USB, the normal sound can be heard of insertion, but the device never appears in My Computer and can not be accessed. I tested this on WinXP and Win7. The device has bootable information, and in fact boots perfectly in another environment, so the device still works, just damaged in such a way as Windows will not recognize it.

Solution- Use Winimage.com to rebuild the module or CF card. If you want to keep photo’s or data on your current CF card, you will need to have a good recognizable CF card on hand that your PC will recognize. Start Winimage with a good CF card. Select the device (Disk->Use removable disk “x”). Remove the CF card and insert your unrecognizable unit. Now select Disk->Creating Virtual Hard Disk Image from Physical Drive. Select the Disk (in my case a 1Gb CF card was Disk2 : 990,864 KB - Generic Storeage Device 9339). Give it a name and store on your pc as *.vhd file. Now select Disk->Restore Virtual Hard Disk Image from Physical Drive. If all went correctly, you can remove and install the CF card and Windows will once again see your device, with all your data as well.