Not seeing SD card?

[twistedtom]

I got an SD card so that I can take pictures and movies from my computer to my TV. I have a Sandisk reader that reads every known card and all my cards from my cameras show up on my computer. I do not have a camera that uses SD cards so the SD card has never been formatted in a camera and it does not show up on my computer. I formatted it in my TV and it shows up there but not on my computer. I went to Sandisk’s web site and all they had windows software for it. I even tried running parallels and it does not show up in Windows ether. So I think maybe I need to try formatting it in a camera for it to work; am I right? I should be able to move movies on to it also; is this right?

[mikehalloran]

2G or smaller SD cards are normally formatted in FAT 16. Larger or SDHC cards are formatted in FAT 32.

Your SanDisk reader, hooked up to your Mac should be able to accomplish this. Start up Disk Utility. Select the SD card and FAT 16 and FAT 32 should be format options in the pull-down menu when you Erase.

The card should now be readable by everything.

[twistedtom]

Thanks Mike it turns out I had a bad card.

[mhschmieder]

I'm not so sure this is your problem.

I had a similar problem a few months back with xD cards used by my Kurzweil PC3X keyboard.

Rebooting in 32-bit mode solved the problem.

Same SanDisc reader as yours, as far as I can tell. Same problem, essentially.

I'm doing this from memory; I wrote this up on the forum at the time, so maybe searching SanDisc would find it (xD is too short of a search string).

I don't think I had this problem with SD cards yet, but only have one device that uses them, so it's hard to know if the xD problem was due to how the Kurzweil formatted them or something specific to that flash memory variant that didn't work with 64-bit drivers.

[twistedtom]

The card was a Sony 8Gb and i got a SanDisc 2Gb card and the 2Gb card works. I am not sure but do you think for some reason the 8Gb card is to big?

[mikehalloran]

The card was a Sony 8Gb and i got a SanDisc 2Gb card and the 2Gb card works. I am not sure but do you think for some reason the 8Gb card is to big?

Many devices including older cameras cannot use an SD card larger than 2G. If the device does not say that SDHC will work, you can assume 2G is your limit.

I saw some off-brand 4G SD cards at B&H a while back - never bought one so I don't know if that was a labeling mistake or there really is a higher capacity SD card out there that might work. 2G is as high as I need for those units so I never bought one to try.

When I bought my daughter a new camera a while back, I tested its 4G SDHC card in my older devices - none of them worked with it. Even re-formatting it FAT-16 didn't help.

Older SD cards usually work in the newer devices in my experience. They cannot be formatted FAT-32 so, if that's a requirement, they won't work.

Some units require a card to be a certain speed to work properly. I have a Fostex recorder that cautions the user not to use high speed cards CF or it will become unstable. Since the slow ones were cheaper, I liked that.

If you look, you will see that there are fewer available choices for regular SD and CF cards now. Might be the time to buy a few spares if you have a device that can't use the HC versions.

[twistedtom]

Interesting, thanks. My first flash card was 64Mbs and it was not cheap.