'Scuse quoting - didn't get the original post...

"John Stumbles" wrote in message
...
[crossposted to comp.os.linux.misc as well as *.photo.* groups because I
know there'll be people there clued up about comp systems, and uk.d-i-y
for
folks clued up about life the universe and everything :-)]

I have a 128M CF card which has recently started playing up in my digicam
(Nikon Coolpix 3100 fwiw). After taking a lot of pictures the camera
suddenly reports that the card is not formatted. I can recover the
pictures
from the card (using various commercial utilities, or dd-ing to an image
and
pulling out chunks starting with the jpeg header from the image file).
snip
Is there any way of testing to be sure, using what I have he the camera
itself, a usb card reader, linux and win2k systems, some loo rolls and
sticky-back plastic ... :-) ?



Linux - excellent. Try running "badblocks" over the card, eg:

badblocks -p 10 -w /dev/sd?

Where /dev/sd? is the device node for the CF card (whole disk, not
partitions). If you have any SATA drives present, please watch out as
later versions of linux present them as pseudo SCSI devices too, so
/dev/sda *might* be your main disk and not the CF card.

The above will give it ten passes (change the -p option for more or
less) of writing 4 data patterns over the CF and verifying them.

If no errors, try -p bigger number and run it overnight.

Note that this is a destructive test(!) so save your data off it first.

I know this works, had a dodgey Crucial CF card once, and badblocks showed
up errors in roughly the places I expected them based on how many pictures
were taken before the camera choked.

You'll need to reformat the card afterwards too.

HTH

Tim