Please help me :)

[2jamesl]

Hi sorry to bother you all but im so desperate!

I have recently purchased a 2GB SD Card which upon entrance into the SD slot on the PC's tower comes up with the message reading "The drive is not ready for use; its door may be open. Please check drive \Device\Harddisk1\DR2 and make sure that a disk is inserted and that the drive door is closed.

I need help before Sunday as i really would like to use this card to take pictures at an event.


Many thanks

[driverrob]

That's a strange error message. Someone may come up with a better suggestion but, in the mean time:
Try other makes or smaller capacities of SD card. For some reason SD card readers can be very choosey. You might find one that works.
I made the mistake of buying a VK4000 phone last year and it seems only to recognise Sandisk (micro) SD cards.

[2jamesl]

Yes all of the others work perfectly but the strange thing is, this one used to work. I have fiddled around with the services.msc thing and turned things on and off so is there anything to watch out for there?

Thanks

[SS2.]

Thinking out loud here, but it could be a faulty card, card not formatted (or not formatted correctly) or your PC's reader does not support 2GB SD cards..

Have you tried using the card in the camera yet ?

[2jamesl]

Yes the card works perfectly in the camera which is the annoying thing, i have formatted the Card numerous times but to no avail. Is there any free data recovery software out there as a last resort?

Thanks

[SS2.]

2jamesl said:

Yes the card works perfectly in the camera which is the annoying thing, i have formatted the Card numerous times but to no avail. Is there any free data recovery software out there as a last resort?

Plenty, I suspect... Like this (just googled, not tried).

But I can't see it helping if Windoze doesn't recognise the card in your reader.

Do you have any other 2GB cards which your reader recognises OK ?

[mcarrick69]

Why not use a USB connected to the camera.

[cyberface]

mcarrick69 said:

Why not use a USB connected to the camera.

It may be slow but it's your best bet unless your Windows USB mass storage driver is corrupted somehow. Or if the camera is dodgy and uses a custom driver, most decent cameras these days just use vanilla mini-USB sockets and the mass storage standard.

Do *any* other cards / USB keydrives work when filled with more than 1 GB of data? It could be that the card always worked fine when the card was only half full...

Normally the compatibility issue is with the newer SD-HC cards, which are 4 GB and above (HC being high capacity) - if 1 GB works, normally 2 GB works as well. There's nothing particularly special about the 2 GB size like there is about the 4 GB size (limit of 32 bit addressing).

If it works perfectly in the camera then I wouldn't overly worry about it - shoot to your heart's content and if you can't get it working in your PC in the end, just get any bureau to copy all the files off the card onto a DVD, or borrow a USB card reader, etc.

It could be that the hardware in the PC is failing - but just a thought - if the SD slot on the PC (I'm assuming a desktop here) is on the front of the PC box, then it will have a cable connecting it to the motherboard. I'd open the box up and make sure the cable is well connected, these things have a habit of working loose. Most likely to be Windows though.

[2jamesl]

Thanks to everyone and an extra big thanks to Cyberface

I appreciate all of your help and i am just going to try to resolve the problem now.

[2jamesl]

Cyberface thank you so much!

It works with the USB cable plugged in, thanks so much you have no idea what this means to me

[cyberface]

2jamesl said:

Cyberface thank you so much!

It works with the USB cable plugged in, thanks so much you have no idea what this means to me

Cheeers, but credit is due to mcarrick69 who originally suggested the camera->USB cable idea, not me!