Well $%$#

[smoke665]

For the second time this year, an SD card crapped out on me. Just like the last time, I put the card in the reader, it first came up, then it went wonky, then it gave me a file not recognized then, format card. Fortunately there weren't many images on it this time. After the first time I threw out the SD card, bought new cards, and a new reader. I reformatted the card now works fine again????? It's really a bummer not knowing what is causing it.

 

[cgw105]

Did it display in another camera?

 

[nerwin]

What cards are they?

I've only had two memory cards crap out on me, one was a Transcend that worked for years and another one was a Sony card that didn't like any camera it was in but worked on the PC just fine.

I don't know. Memory card are weird..

But I never had issues with SanDisk cards. I still have an old one I bought many years ago, 128mb that was nearly $140 and it still works lol.

 

[Jeff1536]

Nothing lasts forever ...

 

[Thiophilos]

A contact of a card can (rarely) fail to make contact for a moment. If that happens during a write, it can create an error on the card. Once or twice (in all my digital years) have had a message on the LCD that there was no card present when there was a card present. Reseating it fixed that. I did have an error once on a card when we were in a hurry switching back and forth to a computer. Same kind of issue. It recovered by itself from that without data loss.

There's not much one can do about contact failure, I guess, except to keep the contacts clean and never touch them.

There are other ways for a card to fail (static electricity for instance) but none I can think of for a failure while in the camera.

 

[smoke665]

There are other ways for a card to fail (static electricity for instance) but none I can think of for a failure while in the camera.

That's the problem I'm not sure where the blame lays. It was working in camera fine. When I stuck it in the card reader on my computer it worked fine for a few seconds and then it started acting funky. When I tried it back in the camera it wouldn't read it, however I noticed I was now getting a low battery alert on the camera.

The card that failed this time was a Lexar Pro

 

[smoke665]

Well, I was this many years old today, when I discovered my habit of deleting images in camera, could be the source of my problem. Apparently frequently deleting files on your camera's memory card can heighten the risk of data corruption. Each deletion can destabilise the filesystem that most camera memory cards utilise, potentially leading to file loss or a card that becomes completely unreadable. Lesson learned.

 

[Thiophilos]

Well, I was this many years old today, when I discovered my habit of deleting images in camera, could be the source of my problem. Apparently frequently deleting files on your camera's memory card can heighten the risk of data corruption. Each deletion can destabilise the filesystem that most camera memory cards utilise, potentially leading to file loss or a card that becomes completely unreadable. Lesson learned.

I misread your first post and thought it was an in-camera failure.

I am familiar with the fears of corruption caused by in-camera deletion, but I don't think it is a real danger. Any operating system can suffer errors and they could cause corruption, but why would a deletion carry more risk than saving a photo to the card? (But I don't know for sure.)

Deleting in-camera risks deleting the wrong photo or photos, or you could delete the one intended and then suffer deleter's regret. That's why I don't do that.

A card can get corrupted by the camera or user interrupting a write.

 

[Woolsocks]

I had the same issue. Turned out to be cold and humidity reacting with the metal contacts. Photographing 30 degree's colder then manufacturer's minimum temperature.

Well, I was this many years old today, when I discovered my habit of deleting images in camera, could be the source of my problem. Apparently frequently deleting files on your camera's memory card can heighten the risk of data corruption. Each deletion can destabilise the filesystem that most camera memory cards utilise, potentially leading to file loss or a card that becomes completely unreadable. Lesson learned.

Windows will sometimes tell me there are errors on the drive and give me the option to "fix" them. But fixing them leads to more errors and data corruption. Then I have to format the card. I format the card in windows to something the camera will recognize, then I format it in camera. I believe this happened to me because windows does not know the difference between one memory card and a usb stick drive.

Or it's humidity and dirt on the metal contacts of the card or your memory card to usb attachment.

Or you stopped transferring files in the process of transferring and that corrupted your card. Only way to get past that is format in windows and then format in the camera.

 

[smoke665]

@Thiophilos and @Woolsocks a friend has been telling me this since my first failure months ago. After this I did some internet searching and found some interesting information on why you shouldn't delete in camera. There's a lot of advice not to, but I found this the easiest to understand, from a former Director of Marketing at Lexar, Jeff Cable.

According to him, deleting an image doesn't actually delete it from the card, it deletes it from the FAT, (file allocation table) the actual image remains on the disk until it's overwritten by something else. Deleting an image from the FAT only removes the image file but not any ancillary files associated with the image file. Overtime the FAT gets scrambled leading to corruption. His recommendation was to offload your images to computer, delete them from the card, and reformat the card "in camera", before using again.

Something else I didn't fully comprehend is that formatting a card doesn't erase the data either, it just clears the FAT completely. Lexar supplies a recovery tool that will supposedly allow you to access that data even after formatting the card. I've downloaded it to try later today.

 

[Thiophilos]

@Thiophilos and @Woolsocks a friend has been telling me this since my first failure months ago. After this I did some internet searching and found some interesting information on why you shouldn't delete in camera. There's a lot of advice not to, but I found this the easiest to understand, from a former Director of Marketing at Lexar, Jeff Cable.

According to him, deleting an image doesn't actually delete it from the card, it deletes it from the FAT, (file allocation table) the actual image remains on the disk until it's overwritten by something else. Deleting an image from the FAT only removes the image file but not any ancillary files associated with the image file. Overtime the FAT gets scrambled leading to corruption. His recommendation was to offload your images to computer, delete them from the card, and reformat the card "in camera", before using again.

Something else I didn't fully comprehend is that formatting a card doesn't erase the data either, it just clears the FAT completely. Lexar supplies a recovery tool that will supposedly allow you to access that data even after formatting the card. I've downloaded it to try later today.

This is all well known. It's how Windows manages its files. I delete thousands of files and Windows deletes thousands more files that I never know about, and there is never a FAT error. OK, rarely there is an error, like once every few years. Those are probably caused by a rare collision of events, like removing a drive when windows was busy with a maintenance task while there was an app experiencing memory leakage all at the same time.

Similar things probably go on in cameras. I think I once heard that camera operating systems are based on Linux. Anyway, they operate in similar ways.

Deleting a FAT entry is a very low duty event compared to writing a sector. That's why they do it that way - it's much faster and it probably also greatly reduces the chances of error. But a bad FAT entry can screw up the whole drive.

 

[adamhiram]

Apparently frequently deleting files on your camera's memory card can heighten the risk of data corruption.

Hopefully this is all it was, and changing a minor habit addresses it. At least it sounds like you didn't lose anything critical. I've never had any issues with SanDisk memory cards, although I did have the plastic casing on a Lexar XQD card physically break (a common issue with these cards); quick fix with superglue and I'm still using it. My current body uses dual card slots (SD+XQD), which hasn't saved my hide yet, but I'm sure that day is coming.

 

[smoke665]

Hopefully this is all it was, and changing a minor habit addresses it.

Both bodies have dual slots. You can save Raw to one and JPEG to the other, but you can't switch to one slot or the other for Raw. When the first card fills up other will auto shift to the second, or you have to physically swap slots.

Hopefully this is the issue.

 

[smoke665]

Okay, final word, could have been the way I've been deleting files on the camera, could have been a low battery issue on the camera. I reformatted the card, and charged the battery everything is working fine so far. Lexar has a cool free recovery tool that I downloaded and scanned the card, it found all the images on the card, which I was able to recover and resave to another location. You can go here to download Downloads | Lexar However, I couldn't open the images taken last, the files were corrupted, possibly due to the unnoticed low battery. Lesson learned, will be more careful going forward.

 

[Peeb59]

Based on several card failures, I was insistent on dual SD cards back in the DSLR days. I was super nervous about getting a mirrorless with a single CF Express card, but 19,300 images later, I've had no failures. I think they must be more robust than SD.

Like you, I've been really unlucky with SD cards.