Today I hardly shoot on film, but use flash memory cards in various formats. As with film, flash cards need problem solving, too. I found out that information is still hard to find. This is what I found out.

File recovery

A flash card is easily damaged, for instance with inserting in a card reader. Some Olympus users report problems with Smart Media (SM) or Extreme Digital (xD) cards when files are deleted using a PC-based flash card reader. First priority is to recover the images on the card.

A lot of tools are capable of recovering flash cards, most of which show you the photo's, but won't recover without banners until you have paid $ 30 to $60. Not unreasable if you are desparate, but for a tool you only use once (hope so!) quite a lot of money. I have found two exceptions:

The tools are free and recovery of the lost images is pretty straitforward. No teasers or banners, just your images.

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xD Picture card: Card Error

A damaged xD card may be accessible with a PC and a card reader, but still give problems in the camera. I have had this with a 256 Mb xD card and an Olympus C-370Z (and also a C-470Z). The card cannot be used to write or read images. The Olympus only displays a blue screen with "card error" and refuses to do anything else untill the card is removed from the camera. The Olympus C-470Z offers some more options, but no solution to the card error.

The problem is that some readers may damage the Olympus low-evel header. The same is the case if the xD Card has been formatted on a PC to a FAT/FAT32 or NTFS file system. The card need to be reformatted and the low-level header rewritten.

This cannot be done in the Olympus camera, because it refuses to format a damaged card. There are two possible solutions:

Some flash card readers provide tools for formating flash cards like CFprep.exe and SMprep.exe for CompactFlash and SmartMedia. look for xdprep.exe to use for the xD-card. Problem is that you will use the special panorama functionality with the Olympus xD-Cards provide. This requires a special "CIS" field on a specific location on the card.

If you do not have xdprep.exe (I did not and could not find any either), take the xD card to the store or find a friend with a Fuji camera: the card will format on the Fuji-camera, though the Olympus refuses!

SM card: Card Error

The same card error may occur when using SmartMedia cards. There is some more information available in this:

Olympus panorama header

To restore the panorama function on reformatted Olympus flash cards or on non-Olympus flash cards: