Soyo Flash Reader Messed Up My Smart Media Card

[BraveSirRobbin]

I have an Olympus digital camera and have been using an 8MB Smart Media card with it. I have been downloading pictures using the floppy "Camedia" adapter (yes, it was slow).

I recently purchased a Soyo Flash Reader AVI 6.1 described here.

The install went great using Win XP and an Asus A7N266 V/M/E AA motherboard.

I placed the smart media card in the reader and downloaded my pictures (yes, it was fast).

The problem is that when I entered the smart media back into the camera it gave an error message. It appears something is wrong with the smart media card. I reentered the card back in the reader and it shows that the media is write protected (which it never was).

I tried installing the flash formater (that came with the reader) and it to says the media is write protected.

Since then I purchased a 64MB smart media card (yes, lots more pictures) and it is working with the camera. But, I'm scared of placing it in the reader because of my past experience with the 8MB card.

I tried contacting Soyo technical support describing this problem (yes, no response).

Anyone have any ideas as to what is going on here?

Appreciate any information on this problem!!

Thanks,

BSR

(Hey, my 500th post, woohoo)

 

[ScrapSilicon]

you tried reformatting the 8 ..?

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

Yes I did. I was doing some more searching on the web and I found this on a digital camera forum:

""All SM readers look like a mountable drive to the PC, so I doubt that yours is any different. Most readers come with SMPrep somewhere on their driver disk: if not it's pretty easy to find on the web. All it does is a low-level format of the card and the "kludged" versions do no more than write "OLYMPUS PAN 1.0" into the card's boot sector.""

I also found out that if you do not "eject" the Smart Media before you pull it out of the Flash Reader, you could damage the card and have to "rebuild" this file using a hex editor and some hack I have to look into more (to late tonight).

I'm also wondering why they are calling it "smart" media now.

I placed my 64MB smart media card in the card reader now that I'm armed with the info on the eject sequence. The file could not be read, said it was corrupted. I thought oh boy, here we go again. But, before I removed the media I did the "eject" sequence, removed the media, placed it back in the camera, and it worked OK.

I then placed the 64MB in the Camedia Floppy Adapter and was able to copy this file OK on the computer.

So, I really don't know what is going on now!

Thanks for the reply!