Hello all, this is a new one for me.
Shooting a project yesterday on cards that were formatted in camera (1DS MKIII) & came back to the studio to download three sandisk extreme IV 2 gig cards. I was downloading them chronologically the way they were shot. First card downloaded fine as with the third card but the second card was empty, not even DCIM & MISC folders. I ran a fresh download of image rescue 2.6 (using a low level search) and was able to recover all of the images except one, which was partially corrupted.
As this has never happened to me before, my confidence in this particular card is a bit shaken and my question is...

is there any way to test the card?
do these cards need to be updated to current firmware? I didn't even know that they had firmware
do cards have a lifespan? these cards have ben used quite a bit
is there any other/better image recovery software?

I would appreciate any feedback anyone might have...

Thanks,
Mike

I don't have the final answer, just a suggestion. While formatting by camera is recommended, and formatting by computer is not, there may still be a "low level format" that needs to be redone, and there should be utilities around to accomplish that.

Thanks for the suggestion, I will look into it and post what I find out...

Mike,

I too have had some weird issues with the IV cards. I originally bought 4 of them and them added 4 more. They are all labeled so I can tell which is which. Well one of the newer 4 seems to, on occasion, rear it's ugly on me. I will get a random just plain corrupted file - usually just 1 or 2 - so corrupt it will mess with me when I make a backup copy of the folder. I have to hunt down the bad file and delete it to complete the copy of the folder.

We have tried to get a repeat by downloading the cards into a folder just for a particular card - of course which ever cards is the trouble maker behaves when we do this.

The issue has shown up in both a MKII & MKIII so I know it is the card, I just don't know which one.

I have done a re-format on a PC of all the cards twice and then of course did a cmaera format before using but so far this gremlin is not totally solved.

Makes me wonder if there is a bad run of Extreme IV cards. If I could pinpoint the card I would just send it back to Sandisk for a new one but until them I just live dangerously.

Wish I could give you more answer but I am still searching myself.

Ken

A couple more thoughts: Since formatting is usually redoing the FAT/FAT32 sections only, if you have a PC, try a thorough scan (scandisk, etc.) of the card. You can usually get to that through the properties when you right-click the card in windoze explorer. You should see checkboxes for "fix all bad stuff...." etc.