Well I feel your pain. I just found a sale on a Seagate 500gig external hard drive that should have been plug an play. Well installation instructions were almost nil and had additional software that would back up your entire computer which I didn't want to use. It was surposed to be an image only archive.
Well it wouldn't allow anything on it and when I reformated the drive on another computer it worked only once the the data came back as being as corupt as a politician. Well I intentionally didn't put anything that important and not that much of it on the drive. So it was to the website to find tech support. To my surprise I found a number. No surprise though it was to someone in India. Now their English was far better than anything native they may speak, and being from the south and part Cherokee my Southern drawl was WAYYY different their their southern accent. My slight hearing loss didn't help either.
Well after almost an hour on the phone it was download the testing software to test the drive. Well guess what? Its a big file. It took forever. When done, I found another problem. It needed Microsofts Framework.net 2.0 or later to work. Mine was older, but worse than that it IIRC was part of the reason I had my first encounter with MS tech support that was also in India and took over 4 hours on the phone to fix a problem with one of the XP updates. FUN FUN
Well found the new Framework.net and at first I thought I was lucky. It was only a 10 meg file. But no, that was just the installer. The real file was another 100 megs. More fun yet. After a wonderful day waiting on downloads its was finally fixed.
Now that I had Framework.net 2.0 or later, I ran the testing software and sure enough it was bad. Back to Best Buy for a swap. Think I am through?? But no!!! That drive did exactly the same thing.
By this time I am beginning to understand Indian nearly well enough to be related to Apu and open my own Quickey Mart. (for those that may not get the Simpsons its part of a cartoon that's been on in the US for over a decade that is perfectly even handed in poking fun at everyone) Back on the phone, explained the situation. Reran most of the tests. Tried the 2nd drive and it tested bad too. Ok unless I was going to try to move up into management in the Quickey Mart chain, it was time to punt. That sale price seemed to be not such a good of a deal anymore. Back to Best Buy for another swap. This time instead of a desk top, I decided to go portable. No way Id get another Seagate, so I decided on a Maxtor that used the USB to power the unit.
First I couldn't tell till I opened the plastic clam shell that you needed 2 USB ports for this to work. Uh Oh. I only have 2 USB ports and its going to be hard to use a USB card reader and printer if this drive has them all occupied. Worse than this the computer when its plugged in doesn't see the drive. Back to the web and go to the Maxtor site. Go to tech support and find a number. UH OH!!!! That number is familiar. Look a little closer and realize that Maxtor had been bought out by Seagate and before I know it I may be ready for the Quickey Mart Board. They are telling me that that drive is bad too, when I realize I haven't restarted the computer to see if that helped. Alas it seemed to fix my problem. I am beginning to think my troubles are over, but not quite.
Back to Best Buy again, this time for a USB hub. Find one and take it home. Plug both the USB connectors of the working drive into the hub, and my working drive seems to now be non working. There was no power cord with this one. Uh oh again. Well it turns out the drive will only work with one plugged directly into the computer. The other can work in a hub. Yet experience taught me it has to be specific ones on the drive. Get them backwards and it doesn't work. Card reader works in the hub with the drive connected. I turn blue as I hold my breath to try to print something with the printer connected to the hub. FINALLY it works. What should have taken 3 minutes ended up taking 3 days.
Who said digital was better?? Tell me why again???
Mark
Now fluent in Indian and more gray hair added to the collection
--- On Thu, 6/12/08, karl shah-jenner <shahjen@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From: karl shah-jenner <shahjen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: card reader
> To: "List for Photo/Imaging Educators - Professionals - Students" <photoforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Thursday, June 12, 2008, 7:42 PM
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Chris"
>
> : My camera uses a xD picture card. I've been using a
> separate USB card reader
> : to read it but I recently purchased an internal card
> reader. This reads CF
> : and SD cards but although the slot takes the card, it
> cannot see the xD
> : card. It almost sees it, the mouse changes as I put it in
> but my computer
> : says "no disc in drive".
>
> Mark writes:
> Sounds to me like it's not designed to read xD cards.
> :
>
>
> there's incompatibility between cards and readers wih
> XD's according to the wikipedia article I read the
> other day when someone brought around a card that went
> wrong on them. I'd not worked on an XD card prior to
> this..
>
> I have 3 internal readers on three PC's and had just
> bought *yet another* external reader to read/recover data
> from a dodgy Smartmedia card - another card type which also
> has compatibility issues, but had no luck with that reader
> either.
>
> The customer had pulled the XD from their camera and loaded
> it into a card reader at a friends house - they'd had no
> trouble in the past - but on this occassion the card reader
> didn't see their card. when they put it back into the
> camera it registered as corrupted, hence the visit to me.
>
> I suggested that as they were on their way home to the
> other side of the country they wait till they got home,
> load the card in the reader they know *did* recognise the
> card and run a few recovery programs over it.
>
>
> but I ramble.
>
> Best bet Chris is to revert to your external reader and use
> the internal for other things :(
>
> Karl
