Leo

Digital cameras are here to stay. So is hooking them up via USB and copying pictures onto a harddrive and burning CDs. So I guess we need to understand what the heck we are doing right? Sometimes you gotta find out the hard way. I noticed that the more I used my 128mb card the less pictures it would hold. Even if I deleted all the pictures there was still less and less room on the card after each picture taking session. Neither the camera nor my PC recognized anything further to delete. Yet it appeared my 128mb card had shrunk to 110mb. 18mbs went poof and were gone. Well I researched it a little. It seems Windows was leaving unaddressable fragments on the card. The problem would just continue to compound until I did something about it. So Format the Flash Memory I did. You know the thing they teach you to be scared of in school cause you might acidentally do the harddrive. Well I didn't format my harddrive but the action of right clicking the Camera drive and Formatting it turned the card into a useless lump. The Camera no longer recognized the card at all. How could this be? Well, time to do a little more research. Here is the answer. ME, XP and Windows 2000 all default to the FAT32 file system format. I have XP. Even though digital cameras are pretty new technology the firmware on most (mine included) only recognizes regular FAT format (FAT16 or FAT12). So though the camera no longer read the flash memory it actually was fine, just formatted in a file system the camera could not read. So at this point using the camera to reformat the card in the correct file system was not possible. Well time to trash that memory right?... Wrong! How do you fix that? I got the answer to that as well. Get a card reader that accepts your style of memory. As long as the card reader will work with ME, XP or 2000 it won't care if the card is FAT32 and will be able to reformat just fine. Just right click the card reader drive in My Computer and reformat to FAT NOT the default FAT32 and you just fixed the problem. The Camera will be able to read and use the card just fine after that. And guess what? The card will now take the full 128mb . Sure always formatting by using the camera format function in the future is an option. But doing so from the card reader saves batteries. As does grabbing picture files, swapping over downloaded MP3s and downloaded PDA programs. This little card reader thing is usefull. Because I got one that reads multiple formats, I can get copies of just about anybodies photos just by borrowing their memory card a few minutes. Sometimes the learning curve of life needs a little adversity. This was a good lesson.

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