memory cards behaving erratically on M9...?

[ArtZ]

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Not on my PC's running XP Pro with all option checked or unchecked, whichever need to be, so the system shows me and gives me access to every file/folder/partition/whatever and file extensions. There are no hidden files/partitions on the SD cards formatted in a M8.

 

Maybe you are talking about a SD card first inserted in a Mac and then brought over to a PC. I don't have a Mac and never plan on having a Mac.

So to me this is totally a Mac thing.

 

Ed,

 

I think you misunderstood me (it's probably my poor English). You're right: there's no hidden files or folders on SD card formatted in a M8 or with a PC.

 

You only get hidden files and folders (that Wilson posted hereabove) when you introduce a SD card in a Macintosh computer running Mac OS X. If you introduced in a Windows system a card you have previously introduced on a Macintosh system, you will see the hidden files and folders which were created by Mac OS X (only if "Show hidden files and folders" option is activated on Windows --different ways to do that depending if you're using XP or Vista).

 

The test I proposed to Wilson it's just a way to verify what I've just said.

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[wlaidlaw]

Ed/Manuel,

 

It IS the Mac that is creating these additional files and folders, when you insert the card. I did like Manuel suggested and formatted a card in my M8, locked it and looked for hidden files and there were none. This amplifies what I said further up, that formatting an SDHC card in a Mac and hoping it will work in an M9, may be a no-hoper. Borrow a Ricoh to re-format a card which will not format in an M9 is my recommendation. Here is a pic of the card with hidden files turned on and showing none.

 

Wilson

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[Shootist]

Ed,

 

I think you misunderstood me (it's probably my poor English). You're right: there's no hidden files or folders on SD card formatted in a M8 or with a PC.

 

You only get hidden files and folders (that Wilson posted hereabove) when you introduce a SD card in a Macintosh computer running Mac OS X. If you introduced in a Windows system a card you have previously introduced on a Macintosh system, you will see the hidden files and folders which were created by Mac OS X (only if "Show hidden files and folders" option is activated on Windows --different ways to do that depending if you're using XP or Vista).

 

The test I proposed to Wilson it's just a way to verify what I've just said.

 

Thanks Art, I understand now that the Mac OS creates those files, which is what I suspected, and doesn't delete/remove them when ejecting the card.

 

RANT on Mac.

 

The one thing I could never stand on a Mac, although it has been years since I've sat in front of a Mac, was that every time you put a flash memory stick/card or a CD/DVD disk in the drive/slot it created a folder on the desktop for that item and didn't delete it after you removed that item. There are other things also but I won't go into them here.

 

RANT on MS/Windows

 

The one thing I could never unsderstand is why MS decided to hide file extensions as the default option in Win Explorer/My Computer. This never made any sense to me as I can have many files with the same name, especially with image files and with other files I use on a daily basis (CAD files created to open in different CAD programs), with different file extensions linking them to completely different programs or to different parts of the same program (as is the case with PS and RAW/PSD/TIFF files).

To a novice computer person this could be totally confusing when looking/searching for a certain file they need to copy, move, send in a email or edit.

[mby]

(...) You don't want to end up re-formatting your Macintosh HD from Journaled HFS to FAT32 by accident, thereby wiping the whole thing. (...)

 

Wilson's perfectly right: the biggest challenge is to point to the right device/disk; this is particularly nasty as there are too many options with the UNIXs where your SD-card might end up, so you can really mess up big time!!! - There command with its parameters is the less dangerous part IMHO (see Wilson's post on top of the page for the man output).

 

Best,

Michael

[mby]

(...)I take euston's point about user error. I'm sure it's possible to get my Epson 4000 to work across my network if I install SL . . . .but people are obviously having a heap of trouble with it. It might be user error (probably is, for using an old printer), but taking hours to get around my error seems a lot less attractive than simply keeping with 10.5.8 for the time being!

 

Apple updated the Epson driver's late last week, and my father had great success with the new ones, so you might want to take a look at Mac OS X v10.6: Printer and scanner software

[mby]

Apple Support says:

 

Can I reformat an SD card with Disk Utility?

 

Yes. Using Disk Utility, you can partition and format an SD device as FAT32 (using the MS-DOS FAT setting) or Mac OS Extended. The Mac OS Extended format can only be used on Macintosh systems. Cards formatted to Mac OS Extended will not be recognized by non-Apple systems.

 

About the SD card slot in MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2.53GHz, Mid 2009), MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2009), and MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2009)

 

Tried it, re-read it and this definitely does not happen here: my 16G SDHC is formatted in FAT16...

[ArtZ]

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Tried it, re-read it and this definitely does not happen here: my 16G SDHC is formatted in FAT16...

 

You mean after formatting your SDHC 16GB on your Mac, you get a volume of only 2GB?

 

Remember, with FAT16 you cannot get volumes bigger of 2GB... so if your Mac uses FAT16, the size of your SDHC 16GB card cannot be greater than 2GB!!!

 

Just to be sure, I've just tried to format a SDHC 16GB with my iMac G5 (Leopard) using Disk Utility with no problems. On the Mac it's displayed as "FAT" but Windows sees it as FAT32.

 

So I conclude it's just a lingustical thing. Mac OS doesn't make any difference on display. FAT16 and FAT32 are shown as "FAT". In fact, it uses FAT32 for SD cards bigger than 2GB but they're displayed as "FAT" even if they're properly formatted as FAT32

[ceflynn]

Disk Utility in Leopard provides the FAT32 volume format. Disk Utility in Snow Leopard does not, offering FAT16 instead. The Knowledge Base article about the SD card slot was published before Snow Leopard shipped. The Info button in Disk Utility gives an unambiguous display of the volume format if the volume itself is selected before the button is clicked.

 

It is possible to use the diskutil command in Terminal to format the card as FAT32 in Snow Leopard:

 

http://www.l-camera-forum.com/leica-forum/leica-m9-forum/101694-m9-problem.html

[wlaidlaw]

Disk Utility in Leopard provides the FAT32 volume format. Disk Utility in Snow Leopard does not, offering FAT16 instead. The Knowledge Base article about the SD card slot was published before Snow Leopard shipped. The Info button in Disk Utility gives an unambiguous display of the volume format if the volume itself is selected before the button is clicked.

 

It is possible to use the diskutil command in Terminal to format the card as FAT32 in Snow Leopard:

 

http://www.l-camera-forum.com/leica-forum/leica-m9-forum/101694-m9-problem.html

 

If you look a few posts up, you will find I did exactly that. However it does not then format correctly in an M8 let alone an M9. The M8 makes another partition and you end up with two volumes called NO NAME, with only a few megabytes of capacity in the user volume.

 

Wilson

[mjh]

Disk Utility in Leopard provides the FAT32 volume format. Disk Utility in Snow Leopard does not, offering FAT16 instead.

DiskUtility doesn’t offer “FAT16” but just “FAT”; whether that’s FAT16 or FAT32 depends on the volume size. I’ve just tried formatting a 16 GB SDHC card with DiskUtility under Snow Leopard, and it did format to FAT32, just as expected.

[ho_co]

In regard to the Mac's hidden files:

 

It writes these to the card when the card is inserted into the card reader and the OS recognizes it as a disk drive. Right?

 

The Mac has been writing these hidden files all along when we inserted cards from our M8s and D-Luci and Canons etc.

 

In other words:

1) Yes, the Mac writes hidden files.

2) But does it make any difference?

 

These files come with the territory with the Mac, and they haven't hampered us till now.

 

Do they create a problem with bigger cards? (So far, no trouble here with up to 4GB.)

 

Do they create a problem with Snow Leopard? (So far, no trouble here with Tiger or with Leopard.)

 

Do the hidden files take up space on the card? I would guess they don't until the OS is used to delete or search for files.

 

Even if they take up space, are they a problem for the camera? They haven't proven to be so far.

[mjh]

The Mac may create a “.Trashes” directory at the toplevel of the card and “.DS_Store” files within some of its folders, but those hidden files and folders don’t do any harm. I’ve used all kinds of cards from all brands and kinds of cameras with my Macs, and there has never been an issue with hidden files.

[ho_co]

RANT on Mac.

The one thing I could never stand on a Mac, although it has been years since I've sat in front of a Mac, was that every time you put a flash memory stick/card or a CD/DVD disk in the drive/slot it created a folder on the desktop for that item and didn't delete it after you removed that item. There are other things also but I won't go into them here.

 

Ed, that's not the way the Mac works.

 

You drag the icon to the trash to eject it. As soon as the computer and card have severed communication, the icon disappears from the desktop and it's safe to remove the card from the cardreader.

 

If you're using a CD/DVD, you can use the eject button on the keyboard; or you can drag the disc to the trash. In both cases, the OS ejects the disc and deletes its icon from the desktop.

[ho_co]

The Mac may create a “.Trashes” directory at the toplevel of the card and “.DS_Store” files within some of its folders, but those hidden files and folders don’t do any harm. ...

Good! Red herring. My point exactly. So we can put the "extra hidden files" issue to rest, can't we?

 

 

One question remains:

mby says (post #46) Disk Utility formats his 16GB cards as FAT16;

mjh says (post #50) Disk Utility formats his 16GB cards as FAT32.

 

Why? What did the two of you do differently?

[Shootist]

Ed, that's not the way the Mac works.

 

You drag the icon to the trash to eject it. As soon as the computer and card have severed communication, the icon disappears from the desktop and it's safe to remove the card from the cardreader.

 

If you're using a CD/DVD, you can use the eject button on the keyboard; or you can drag the disc to the trash. In both cases, the OS ejects the disc and deletes its icon from the desktop.

 

Like I said I haven't sat in front of a Mac in years. In those days, what I remember is, the desktop icon did not go away by itself and why should I need to drag it to the trash can.

 

In any event I won't have to think about this ever again. I'm not a Mac person.

[ceflynn]

Michael,

 

Thank you very much for the correction. This topic is turning out to be more complex than I had anticipated.

 

I have a 20 GB LaCie Databank external drive with both FireWire and USB connections, which I use for relatively quick experiments. At the moment, the drive has a GUID partition map, and two volumes, a Mac OS Extended (journaled) volume 12.88 GB and an MS-DOS volume 6.64 GB. If I erase the MS-DOS volume using Disk Utility in Snow Leopard, and create a new MS-DOS volume, the new MS-DOS volume is FAT32.

 

If I use Disk Utility to erase the FAT32 MS-DOS volume on my 512 MB Swiss Army Knife USB memory stick that I created using diskutil in Terminal, and choose MS-DOS as the new volume format in Disk Utility, I get a FAT16 volume.

 

There is a potentially serious misconception among Macintosh users that when the icon of a volume that has been dragged to the Trash disappears from the desktop, the volume has been properly unmounted. I saw a reference to a case in which something occupied the operating system when the icon was dragged to the Trash, and the volume did not unmount until seven seconds later. I highly recommend using Growl and Hardware Growler (in the Extras folder on the Growl disk image) to get confirmation that a volume has been unmounted:

 

Growl

[ceflynn]

Here is a list of all of the files and folders created at the root level when a volume is mounted for the first time on a Macintosh running Leopard or Snow Leopard:

 

CEFlynnsMBPC2D:~ ceflynn$ cd /Volumes/LACIE_DATAB

CEFlynnsMBPC2D:LACIE_DATAB ceflynn$ ls -lias

total 40

2 8 drwxrwxrwx 1 ceflynn ceflynn 4096 Oct 11 23:14 .

26119 0 drwxrwxrwt@ 4 root admin 136 Oct 11 23:14 ..

5 8 drwxrwxrwx 1 ceflynn ceflynn 4096 Oct 11 23:14 .Spotlight-V100

3 8 drwxrwxrwx@ 1 ceflynn ceflynn 4096 Oct 11 23:14 .Trashes

4 8 -rwxrwxrwx 1 ceflynn ceflynn 4096 Oct 11 23:14 ._.Trashes

7 8 drwxrwxrwx 1 ceflynn ceflynn 4096 Oct 11 23:14 .fseventsd

CEFlynnsMBPC2D:LACIE_DATAB ceflynn$

 

.fseventsd is used by Time Machine, and records all changes to the filesystem that require a new backup of a file.

 

I am not sure whether it is possible to configure the Finder to show some of these files, even if the user is logged in as the root user. This is a case in which Terminal is easier.

[wlaidlaw]

In Leopard and earlier you use the following Terminal command to show hidden files:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

and then the same command with NO in it to hide them.

In Snow Leopard it is much easier. Go to any app and click on open file. Then when the finder window opens, type Shift-Cmd-period (full stop) and hidden files can be toggled on and off. This only works on the open files Finder window and not in the standard Finder window, unlike the result of using the Terminal command.

 

Wilson

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[ArtZ]

DiskUtility doesn’t offer “FAT16” but just “FAT”; whether that’s FAT16 or FAT32 depends on the volume size. I’ve just tried formatting a 16 GB SDHC card with DiskUtility under Snow Leopard, and it did format to FAT32, just as expected.

 

That's is exactly was I said in my last message. It's just a lingustical thing. Macintosh Disk Utility displays just "FAT" but the format is FAT16 or FAT32 depending on the size of the card:

 

-up to 2GB: FAT16

-up to 32GB: FAT32

 

YOU CANNOT FORMAT A SDHC CARD (SD card bigger than 2GB) USING FAT16! So if your Mac actually formats a 16GB SDHC card, using the option "FAT" on Disk Utility, the format is done on FAT32

[mjh]

I have a 20 GB LaCie Databank external drive with both FireWire and USB connections, which I use for relatively quick experiments. At the moment, the drive has a GUID partition map, and two volumes, a Mac OS Extended (journaled) volume 12.88 GB and an MS-DOS volume 6.64 GB. If I erase the MS-DOS volume using Disk Utility in Snow Leopard, and create a new MS-DOS volume, the new MS-DOS volume is FAT32.

 

If I use Disk Utility to erase the FAT32 MS-DOS volume on my 512 MB Swiss Army Knife USB memory stick that I created using diskutil in Terminal, and choose MS-DOS as the new volume format in Disk Utility, I get a FAT16 volume.

Actually that is just what cameras do when formatting cards – opting for FAT32 when the capacity exceeds 2 GB but sticking to FAT16 with smaller cards to ensure compatibility with older cameras.

 

There is a potentially serious misconception among Macintosh users that when the icon of a volume that has been dragged to the Trash disappears from the desktop, the volume has been properly unmounted.

Yes, and that’s why Apple changed that behavior in Snow Leopard: the icon will now go away only when the volume is properly unmounted and can safely be removed.