Greetings all. I come to you today with a plea for help. I was using an 8MB 3V SmartMedia card from Simple Technology and managed to snap up 120+ odd pictures with it. I let it alone for awhile until on a lark I decided to purchase a card reader in order to archive the pictures on my computer. With the smartmedia card inserted in the camera (Olympus D-320L), I turn on the LCD to preview some of them. I get a BLUE SCREEN. The LCD screen turns blue completely, and remaining photo count is 0. None of the buttons on the camera function and there is no other error message. Fearing for my camera's welfare, I plug in my 2MB card and without any problems, it loads up the pictures. I then try my brand new SanDisk USB reader with both cards. The 8MB card showed the picture directory (IMOL something) but there is no data inside the folder!!! If ANYONE can PLEASE help me with this, it would be greatly appreciated! Many many many memories on this damn card that I just can NOT lose =( Thank you in advance for your time!

-- Julius D (imapony@hotmail.com), April 28, 2000

Answers

I'm not a Windows guru, so don't know what specific software to direct you to. BUT, you may have some luck with disk-recovery programs (Norton?). I've heard of people retrieving files from bad cards before, using a reader and recovery software. A word of warning though: You want to *extract* the files, not fix the directory structure on the card. If a program tries the latter & fails, it could prevent a more- capable program from getting at the data later. Hope this helps, good luck!

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), May 04, 2000.

A thought that came to mind was this: if you use a USB card reader and you push the eject mechanism on the USB device, it may have triggered an accidental erase. In the case of Fuji's card reader, you have to go to "My Computer" and pick out the icon that represents your device and tell it to "eject" to avoid this problem. If you took the card out while the camera was on might have done something, but doesn't sound likely.

As far as the blue screen, that normally shows up on an Olympus, but to indicate a problem such as "no card" or "card full".

In your case, I think you're unfortunately out of luck and will have to try and make new memories to capture. I don't think Norton's will help you out, especially if you can't see the files on the smart media disk.

-- Sue Bald (destiny3@ix.netcom.com), May 04, 2000.