thought this worth mentioning, for the potential pentax/nikon dslr owners of the future who'll be faced with SD cards for their storage media http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital "The "Secure" in Secure Digital comes from the card's origin. To create the SD card, Toshiba added encryption hardware to the already-extant MMC card, to calm music industry concerns that MMC cards would allow for easy piracy of music. (" So fouling those sectory and that's that, the card is dead. "The SD Card Association's current licensing agreement does not allow for open-source SD drivers, a fact that generates a fair amount of consternation in the open-source and free software communities. The usual workaround is to develop an open-source wrapper for a closed- source SD driver available on the particular platform, but this is far from ideal. Another common workaround is to use the older MMC mode, which all SD cards are required to support by the SD standard." suggesting it's not a *simple* card.. and anything not simple is prone to failures. "This means that SD is less open than CompactFlash or USB flash memory drives," er, more 'not good' information worse "Documentation for this mode can be purchased from the MMCA for $500; ..MMC mode does not provide access to the proprietary encryption features of SD cards, and the free SD documentation does not describe these features. " basically if you addle the card, that's that. I'm suggesting that if anyone scrambles an SD card don't waste your time trying to salvage it, just buy another I just spent 2 days running every data recovery and diagnostic tool over a brand new card I scrambled - no luck, it was fried. The supplier replaced it though so I was back in business again luckily.. how I forked it? copying a large file onto it when doing something system intensive - it hung the copying process and left crap on the card. Formatting it wiped card -and the secure sectors and rendered it unable to be formatted again :-( more: "The digital rights management scheme embedded in the SD cards is defined as the Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM) by the 4C Entity and is centered around use of the Cryptomeria cipher (also known as C2). The specification is kept secret and is only accessible to licensees. DVD-Audio use a very similar scheme known as Content Protection for Prerecorded Media (CPPM)." crap - DRM built right into the media :-( k
