: we'll all hear more about it in time from http://tinyurl.com/azhe4 "My SD card now filled with big 23 MB chunk of unusable data, even after erasing all folders copied, and I can't move it out by any means. So I formatted my SD card using Flash Format 2.30. The format process went OK. But you shuold know what happened after that! I cannot copy anything to SD card, I can't create a folder in that SD card. A dialog stated that the SD card is full or write protected (it's not) and suggested me to change another card! This problem also occured with one of my fried. So SD card cannot be formatted, because the format process may destroy the secure memory area on the card, rendering the card unusable!!!! And my SD card is gone with the wind!!! " from : http://tinyurl.com/7lpwa (formatting) "It corrupts the card ONLY when it's not read properly -when you think about that -that's normal because it writes to sectors and FAT chain for which belives are free. " from: http://sdprob.aximsite.com/ "Also, some of the space is used by the File Allocation Table (just like your hard drive) but this can depend on how your card is formatted (FAT16, FAT32, etc).. The rest is used by what I call the "Secure Area" (The SD Card Association calls this the "Copyright Protection Mechanism"). Yes, some of your storage has gone to be used as sort-of extension of the File Allocation Table (FAT) to determine what data on the card is protected by copyright" "And guess what happens if the "secure area" becomes corrupted? Say bye-bye to your SD card... A high-level format can't directly access the secure area. (Actually I'll admit the most common question is - why did my SD card go wrong? You should find the answer on the line above...)" I do a fair bit of data recovery and routinely pull data off hard drives serious problems, even with collapsed heads, but I can tell you every tool I threw at the SD was useless just a heads up, that's all folks on a similar note though, we used to learn stuff about our films, developers etc - we knew how to fix test and wash test, we knew how to test shutter speeds etc.. why the reluctance amoung the many that have gone digital to learn digital basics? k
