Zoom Gear & Home Recording Forum

I've been using my ps-04 for a couple of years and have just decided to start using an xd card instead of Smart media. I've bought a smart media/xd converter and 2 xd cards - one fujifilm and one kodak. However, both cards don't seem to work. When I put them in it says card error, and then when I press the system button and then go to the card option it says the card is protected. Is there a way of unprotecting the card, or have a I just got dud cards?

What size xD card?

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmartMedia

Dhad,

Welcome to the 2090. My guess is Wulfraed has hit the nail on the head with the card size error problem. 128mb max for the PS-04.

Howard

both cards are 128mb so i thought they would be ok

Sorry if I jumped the gun on the card size (128mb max). That's usually what the problem is when people have a problem with a new card. Second most often it was incompatible cards.

Samson's website has a list of recommended smartmedia cards for the PS-04 I don't know if the list applies to xd, but fujifilm is one that's on the not recommended list for smartmedia. Kodak is not on the list:
http://www.samsontech.com/products/prod ... rodID=1705

The "protected" error used to show up occasionally on SM cards people had bought, and I think it turned out to be incompatible brands, but I'm not certain.

Two dud cards? Too much coincidence. Bad xm-sd adapter? Maybe. Incompatible brands? Maybe

To test the adapter/xd combo, can you plug the adapter (with xd in it) into the smartmedia reader you used to use with the smartmedia cards (or into another reader)? I suppose you tried that, but if not, plug the card in as a storage device on your computer and see if you can format it fat 32 there, move files to and from it with your computer. If it works that way, try it again on the PS, but on the way there, unplug the xd from the adapter and plug it back in before putting it back into the PS. I had to do that with one xd card, but I don't know why.

If the xd card can't be read or written to by the computer via the xd/sm adapter, can you plug the xd cards into something to test them? If the cards can't be used by the computer, you may have bad cards. Bummer.

These are all procedures I would do, but you may have already tried.

BTW: mine are olympus, they are on the ok list, and I happen to be lucky to own an olympus camera to test them on.

And may I state that my comment was a quick grab from reading information off the web.

Apparently both SM and xD cards are "dumb" cards, requiring the device using them to do most of the work in access, bad block mapping, etc.

CF and SD cards, from what I understand, have onboard controllers, so they present an interface looking more like a drive interface -- the device only has to ask for directory entries and read/write date, the card maps the data into its actual memory.

I didn't include it, in my original comment, but there was mention made of some sort of "copy protect ID" on SM and xD... How those work I don't know -- but might be the next reason for problems.

I don't know anything about xD cards... just a thought... On an SM card you can put a sticker in a circle area in order to protect it (read-only). Make sure you haven't done anything similar with your xD cards.

Good luck.

Good info Wulfraed, sounds to me like the xd/sm adapter is a direct pass-through.

Albert, I remember many posts about stickers. Thanks. That was supposedly one advantage of the smartmedia cards - you could write-protect them. None came with stickers, you had to peel and place them, but many tried scraping off the the plastic window covering the photo sensitive area - later turned out they had incompatible cards. Much talk about that, back in the day...