robsteve Posted October 30, 2007 Share #21 Posted October 30, 2007 Advertisement (gone after registration) . I have not found any diagnostic tools for sd cards. The Transcend 150x cards are really cheap maybe you should give them a try. . I had a transcend 4gb go bad and found a utility on the Transcend site to reformat the card to factory defaults. Mine would not even mount on the computer, so I couldn't run the utility. It turned out my card was splitting apart. In the end I returned the card to Costco for a refund. For the Sandisk cards, the Rescue Pro software that ships with the Extreme III cards has a utility to reformat the card to factory specs. Robert Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advertisement Posted October 30, 2007 Posted October 30, 2007 Hi robsteve, Take a look here Sudden Lockups After 35k Frames. I'm sure you'll find what you were looking for!
sean_reid Posted October 30, 2007 Share #22 Posted October 30, 2007 I don't know if this is card related or not. I myself use Sandisk Ultra II 1 and 2 GB cards and rarely have problems. I still have questions about the possible effects of static electricity on the M8. We're now in a drier time of year (for many of us on the forum) and I'm seeing more posts about lock-ups etc. Some may recall that I was doing an indoor shoot with two M8 bodies last winter (in a high static room) and both of them locked up during the shoot. One recovered after a day with the battery out and the other had to be sent to Leica for replacement. I've yet to have any significant problems with my replacement body but it will be interesting to see what happens this winter. Its possible that firmware changes this year have made the camera less susceptible to problems (ie. the programming in the computer may be harder to crash). If we see hints of a pattern in this (much more common crashes, lockups, etc. in the fall/winter) I think the static question (as one of possibly several causes) should be revisited. Cheers, Sean Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
hankg Posted October 30, 2007 Share #23 Posted October 30, 2007 I had a transcend 4gb go bad and found a utility on the Transcend site to reformat the card to factory defaults. Mine would not even mount on the computer, so I couldn't run the utility. It turned out my card was splitting apart. In the end I returned the card to Costco for a refund. For the Sandisk cards, the Rescue Pro software that ships with the Extreme III cards has a utility to reformat the card to factory specs. Robert Oops, well that's good to know. Maybe we should have a sticky thread with 2 polls. List of cards problem/ no problem. Might be able to identify the most reliable cards. Of course with the leading brands like Sandisk you have to worry about fake cards as well. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tummydoc Posted October 30, 2007 Share #24 Posted October 30, 2007 35,000 shots in 7 months?? That's an average of 166 shots EVERY day! ? Pete. Set it to "continuous" and use a locking cable release Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
InspectorOyster Posted October 30, 2007 Author Share #25 Posted October 30, 2007 >I still have questions about the possible effects of static electricity on the M8. I was about two feet away from a massive stack of subs when it happened. It was cool and relatively dry for New Orleans. >3.If an SD Card is faulty you wont find out until you write to the faulty sector in which case a 'lockup' will probably occur, either in-camera or in PC/Mac. I did a 7 pass erase on some, but not all, of the cards. Disk utility did find some problems when I tried to verify the disk that it was able to repair. That didn't seem to make a difference. I'll grab another card and some cleaning supplies at lunch. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest V64 Posted October 30, 2007 Share #26 Posted October 30, 2007 Hi InspectorOyster >3.If an SD Card is faulty you wont find out until you write to the faulty sector in which case a 'lockup' will probably occur, either in-camera or in PC/Mac. I should have added that much may depend on the error recovery software used by the system when a write error is detected. This may be different on the M8 (less effective?) than on a PC or Mac. Rescue Pro/Disk Utility may have 'better' error management. So if a write is marginal, and requires error recovery, then the end result could well be different between 'drivers'. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
dpattinson Posted October 30, 2007 Share #27 Posted October 30, 2007 Advertisement (gone after registration) The only time I've been able to reproduce a lockup consistently, I subsequently found that the Sandisk SD card had a fault. I tried reformatting in the camera, and subsequently using the supplied software (Rescue Pro). Problem was not resolved so I tossed the card (Sandisk Extreme 3 2GB). I get the occasional lockup still, seems to be linked to firing a second frame quickly on non-CS mode - but it's not easily reproducible. It is slightly irritating that the M8 can't recover a little more elegantly from a failure to write to the SD card. At least a sensible error message would be nice, and this is one place I'd be happy to have an audible warning (like the baseplate removed warning). Saving the buffer contents for a newly inserted card would be fantastic - of course, you'd have to be able to reset the camera without popping the battery for that to be possible. David. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Leica DeOcean Posted October 30, 2007 Share #28 Posted October 30, 2007 My camera shop Leica expert witnessed these lockups in my M8 while we were trying to find out why certain pictures on the card would not show on the computer. It was his thought that the camera may be responding to the multiple uses of the sd card without being totally reformatted every once in a while. He was shooting using his "store" sd card in my M8 and the camera started locking up. Then we swapped back to my own sd card and it continued to lock up. After removing the battery several times and restarting, I finally achieved a "steady state" (no lock ups). I haven't had any since then (two weeks ago). The conjecture was that the "store" sd card might have somehow introduced an electronic "indigestion" by being used in several different cameras without a "reformatting" or cleaning of previous electronic "errors" accumulated over time. This sort of reminds me of the electronic "confusion" or errors that accumulate to the sd card when shooting rapid frames either singly or using "C" setting on the M8. That seems to be the circumstance under which these lock ups and other anomalies appear. I am not as technically savy as most others on this forum are, but if someone who has the time, knowledge and persistence to test this theory, perhaps IMHO it may contain some answers to this problem.. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shootist Posted October 30, 2007 Share #29 Posted October 30, 2007 I would like to know what brand cards are used in cameras that do lock up and those that don't lock up. I have been using Lexar Pro 133x cards exclusively and have not had any lock ups. It seems from reading these post that most lock ups happen when using SanDisc cards. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
InspectorOyster Posted October 30, 2007 Author Share #30 Posted October 30, 2007 I would like to know what brand seems to be the most reliable as well. The 2gb SanDisk Ultra IIs I'm using have been on sale for $30 for a while now. I wonder if they're clearing those out? I had some luck at lunch. I cleaned the card and the camera contacts and then repaired the card in osx disk utility. I put the m8 firmware on the repaired card and restored the camera firmware. I formatted the card in camera and was able to fill the card with no lockups. Formatted the card again and shot a few frames with no problems. I'm going to clean the rest of the cards and do some more testing to find the real bad one(s). >The conjecture was that the "store" sd card might have somehow introduced an electronic "indigestion" This is the same thing I'm seeing and what has me so confused. The one good card that I have identified will lock up a few times after I force a lockup with the bad card. After it gets through those couple of lockups it seems fine until I use a bad card again. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
4season Posted October 30, 2007 Share #31 Posted October 30, 2007 I've had problem cards which worked fine only after using OS X's Disk Utility to format. I thought maybe the the cameras themselves don't actually format, but only mark the space as writeable again--big difference. If you think about it ~5 seconds is really fast for actually formatting a 2 gigabyte volume, particularly when it's a fairly slow medium like flash memory. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shootist Posted October 30, 2007 Share #32 Posted October 30, 2007 I've had problem cards which worked fine only after using OS X's Disk Utility to format. I thought maybe the the cameras themselves don't actually format, but only mark the space as writeable again--big difference. If you think about it ~5 seconds is really fast for actually formatting a 2 gigabyte volume, particularly when it's a fairly slow medium like flash memory. Right the camera doesn't really do a full format. All it does is erase the file allocation table and then write 1 directory (DCIM) and 1 sub-directory (100Leica) to the card. If any camera fully formatted a 2GB card it would take much longer then the 4-8 second it take the M8 to format it. It takes longer on my Core 2 Duo PC to do a full format of a 2GB SD card. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
dpattinson Posted October 30, 2007 Share #33 Posted October 30, 2007 On the subject of cards getting messed up by other readers/cameras/pc's - I now write-lock my cards before putting them into a reader. This means there is no way (afaik) that the reader can corrupt the card. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
InspectorOyster Posted October 30, 2007 Author Share #34 Posted October 30, 2007 The cleaning might have done the trick. Or maybe reformatting the cards in Tiger. I hope it was the cleaning. I've been through three cards now with no lockups. Two more to go. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
marknorton Posted October 30, 2007 Share #35 Posted October 30, 2007 FWIW, I clean each of my three M8s in the way I described every couple of months, use San Disk 2Gb Exreme III and have never had a lockup. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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