Hokay! It's showtime! Let's boogy to play evaluate a dodged up CF card

This may be a destructive test on the CF card and (I hope) on no other bits
of kit.

das B or bagal will not accept any responsibility of maintaining or
repairing a CF card held by another... (so there :-)

The next bit is at your own risk:

1 - prepare a folder of copied files on your computer. Make sure they are
copies because you may lose them.

2 - adjust the size of files in this folder so it represents about 90% of
the capacity of your CF card

3 - if you don't know how to do 1 or 2 - put the kettle on and have a nice
cup of tea or coffee or a lovely soft drink and do not read the rest of this
message##

4 - are you sure? Cookies and milk are ok too?

5 - plug dodgy card into card holder

6 - transfer the data over from the folder you prepared at (1) or (2)
observing any visual indications of encountering a data transfer hiccup

7 - repeat 6 using different folder sizes, time the transfer, bulk it up or
slim it down until the card indicates it is good or dodgy

8 - let us (eg me and the whole wide world of NG readers know how you get
on. I am sure all 25 of us are really quite interested)

das b


"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).
When
I do this usually some of the later images are corrupt: typically they
will
display OK in a thumbnail view but attempting to view at full size the
whole
image is momentarily displayed at reduced resolution but then a portion of
the image (starting at the left side) is replaced by blank or garbage as
the
veiwer attempts to display it at full resolution. (I guess this is related
to the format of jpeg images?)

Anyway I can reformat the card and it works OK, but the problem recurs.
Sometimes when recovering images I find I still have images from earlier
shoots 'further down' the card, suggesting that the card isn't failing at
some particular memory location but more-or-less randomly. I have a
'reference' duff CF card :-) which the camera (and PC via card reader)
report as unformatted even after a format and this card isn't showing that
symptom, but the repeated occurrences of the problem and the fact I don't
get any problems on another CF card (though that is only 32Mb) suggests
that
it's the card at fault rather than the camera.

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 ... :-) ?