Hacking mini sdhc -- m3 works, xp & w7 says not formatted

[reverson1]

Everything was fine with the card yesterday.

Since the sd formatter was recommended (sp?) I decided to backup the card and reformat it using this tool. All went well and I copied the files back to the card.


The quick disk check was quite a bit faster now and everything seemed to be in order so I decided to put a few homebrew games on there. After a bit of trial and error
I was able to find a few games that I thought my son might like. Everything seemed to be fine yesterday....


Today I was going to put a couple more games on the card for him and now windows (7 and xp) keeps saying the the card is not formatted. However, the card still works fine in the M3 real just not on the pc.


I've tried to format the drive (last resort) using the windows format tool but it says that it cannot format the card. (quick and full formats)



Unfortunately, I deleted the backup that I had made of the card and the only backup I have now is two months old...


Is there anyway to get the data off the card? I know it's there bc as I said the m3 can still read the card (quick disk check doesn't report any problems).... wth


Please help!


Thanks
Richard

 

[Saywhatjj4]

you should go and use the panasonic sd formater
Download the Formater

I had the same problem with the windows formater as well but this does a better job

Tell me how it goes

PS. It works with Windows Xp, Vista and Win 7

 

[naglaro00]

^ He said he is already using it.

Maybe your card reader is broken. It happened to me to. Try other SD cards on your card reader. If they work, format your SD card with KillDisk

 

[Etibs]

I had that happen once it was the mini usb reader adapter that was the problem. If you have another adapter try it.

Hope it helps

 

[Saywhatjj4]

Oh, and are you using an SD Adaptor, Usually problems occur with them.

 

[reverson1]

That's what I used before all of this started...

I know a quick format in windows doesn't really delete the files. So it may be possible to recover the files after a format.

Will I be able to recover the files from the card if I use the panasonic formatter again? I'm mainly concerned with losing the sav files....

Thanks
Richard

EDIT:

I've tried using:

The usb card reader that came with the m3
I've also tried two different cameras
---one couldn't read the card at all
---the other reported the correct free/used space, but wouldn't show the files on the card

 

[Saywhatjj4]

you must of had a busted sd reader,

 

[Dark-Sider]

Neither Quckformat nor normal format actually delete files (!).

Quick format just writes the filesystem structures on the disc. In case of FAT that would be the bootblock, two FATs, and the root directory. In case of NTFS it's the bootblock, and the fancy "$files" like $MFT $BOOT $LOGFILE and stuff.

When you do a normal format the difference is that your format-tool *reads* evey sector of your disk to check if there are any bad sectors. If it finds bad Secotrs it marks them as bad (entries in the FAT or $BAD on ntfs).

Just in case you really want to delete your drvie,card, wahatever you will need to get a wiping tool that zeroes your drive.

Note: By not deleting your files I did not say that they are easy to recover, but a computer forensics expert might be able to reconstruct your data...

bye
Darky

 

[reverson1]

That was it.

I replaced the usb reader and it works now.


Thanks for the help!

Richard