CF Card stopped being recognised

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CF Card stopped being recognised

By CFM Mon May 20, 2013 8:32 pm
Hi.

So I turned on my MPC 2500 this morn and went to load from the CF Card I always use and there was nothing there. Literally the night before I was loading and saving from and to the same card. Turned off the MPC and left the card in it and it hadn't been touched until this morn.
I tried another CF card same make/model/size (4GB) and it's recognised.

Has this ever happened to anyone? Any solutions?

It's been about 4 months or so since I backed up the card so there are a whole bunch tracks on it that I'd hate to lose.

Tried finding the files via usb and this came up "disk you inserted is not readable by this computer" again other CF card worked fine.

I'm not sure how much space was left on the card but I had been using it for a good number of years now.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers
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Re: CF Card stopped being recognised

By crossings Mon May 20, 2013 8:37 pm
the CF card that isn't working is probably full or very close to being out of space... that's what happened to me when i filled a 4gb card up once.... i'd recommend hooking it up to the computer with a usb flashcard drive and backing up what you need and erasing what you don't... if you try to mount it from within the MPC it will take a very long time to react, but it will eventually work... just very slowly.

Re: CF Card stopped being recognised

By CFM Mon May 20, 2013 8:44 pm
crossings wrote:the CF card that isn't working is probably full or very close to being out of space... that's what happened to me when i filled a 4gb card up once.... i'd recommend hooking it up to the computer with a usb flashcard drive and backing up what you need and erasing what you don't... if you try to mount it from within the MPC it will take a very long time to react, but it will eventually work... just very slowly.


Great thanks. waiting on a friend to drop off a card reader so hopefully that will solve it.
cheers
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Re: CF Card stopped being recognised

By Metatron72 Mon May 20, 2013 9:00 pm
Have you written a huge amount of saves on the card over the time you've had it? Flash memory's weakness is that it loses speed and becomes less reliable even inoperable after a finite amount of write cycles/saves. Re-formats also shorten the life span.

I've never had a CF card 'die" on me like that but I've had many USB flash sticks become unreadable, or perform erratically. In every case it was after large numbers of write cycles.

I've also had what Crossings described on the "dying" or corrupted flash memory. But at times could get it to work if I waited like 10-20x as long, or used different readers/ports as was mentioned. (I do all this business with a USB 2.0 reader rather than the MPC too)

The numbers are estimated at around 100,000 write cycles, the cards shuffle where data is saved to avoid wearing out the sectors at the beginning of the card's file table first. So the number is actually much higher than 100,000 writes but then you're kinda of still having the overall number lowered as you're saving 16-64 sounds and other data at once all the time, which counts as more than one write cycle.

Here's the first bits of software I came across to recover CF card data.

http://www.wondershare.com/disk-utility ... overy.html

It's a paid app, but at least you can see what type off app might help here. My first concern was that an unreadable CF will either have your reader show nothing or be greyed out as not having a disc mounted. So I wondered how will the app have a Disc/File path to follow and do it's work?

Then I realized the app is like larger recovery software apps and attempts to find and reconstruct corrupted data and also previously deleted data, even after reformatting. So in your case if you have no other option one of these apps might help, but you'll have to re-format so it's mountable again and just keep your fingers crossed.

Transcend has a free app of the same sort here -

http://www.wondershare.com/disk-utility ... overy.html

The warnings say a Transcend reader is best for the app as it can't be sure your USB or internal reader will not do some type of file clearing after reformatting. It seems the app will handle a format (might bet on that over an OS reformat), but again the issue of will your reader behave as the app expects?

None of this may work or help but that's probably the why behind the card's trouble's if you've written to it very frequently. Hope you get the data out.

Re: CF Card stopped being recognised

By CFM Tue May 21, 2013 1:33 am
Metatron72 wrote:Have you written a huge amount of saves on the card over the time you've had it? Flash memory's weakness is that it loses speed and becomes less reliable even inoperable after a finite amount of write cycles/saves. Re-formats also shorten the life span.

I've never had a CF card 'die" on me like that but I've had many USB flash sticks become unreadable, or perform erratically. In every case it was after large numbers of write cycles.

I've also had what Crossings described on the "dying" or corrupted flash memory. But at times could get it to work if I waited like 10-20x as long, or used different readers/ports as was mentioned. (I do all this business with a USB 2.0 reader rather than the MPC too)

The numbers are estimated at around 100,000 write cycles, the cards shuffle where data is saved to avoid wearing out the sectors at the beginning of the card's file table first. So the number is actually much higher than 100,000 writes but then you're kinda of still having the overall number lowered as you're saving 16-64 sounds and other data at once all the time, which counts as more than one write cycle.

Here's the first bits of software I came across to recover CF card data.

http://www.wondershare.com/disk-utility ... overy.html

It's a paid app, but at least you can see what type off app might help here. My first concern was that an unreadable CF will either have your reader show nothing or be greyed out as not having a disc mounted. So I wondered how will the app have a Disc/File path to follow and do it's work?

Then I realized the app is like larger recovery software apps and attempts to find and reconstruct corrupted data and also previously deleted data, even after reformatting. So in your case if you have no other option one of these apps might help, but you'll have to re-format so it's mountable again and just keep your fingers crossed.

Transcend has a free app of the same sort here -

http://www.wondershare.com/disk-utility ... overy.html

The warnings say a Transcend reader is best for the app as it can't be sure your USB or internal reader will not do some type of file clearing after reformatting. It seems the app will handle a format (might bet on that over an OS reformat), but again the issue of will your reader behave as the app expects?

None of this may work or help but that's probably the why behind the card's trouble's if you've written to it very frequently. Hope you get the data out.


I've tried both using a card reader and recovery apps. No joy unfortunately.
I probably didn't word my original post correctly.
The card just isn't detected when inserted into the MPC and I get "disk you inserted is not readable by this computer" when I use usb from MPC and separate card reader.
Corrupt card possibly?
Yes there was a huge amount of stuff written to the card. Never reformatted though.
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Re: CF Card stopped being recognised

By crossings Tue May 21, 2013 3:34 pm
did you switch that CF card between the MPC and some other piece of gear that uses CF cards? it may have gotten corrupt that way... my issue was that the MPC would hang and get stuck for a looooong time when in the LOAD/SAVE screen... i thought it was broken until i let it sit for like 20 minutes... when the CF card was full i also noticed that my MPC would boot up much slower when first turning it on... just an observation. good luck sorting it out.

Re: CF Card stopped being recognised

By djestouff Mon Feb 03, 2014 3:13 am
I just came across the same exact issue this morning! its really sad, I was working on a track I was really happy with all yesterday and now all of a sudden the CF card is no longer readable in the MPC or on my computer.

So far I've found out that there are some programs (Disk Drill for Mac, EASEUS for windows) that can at least see there are some wav files on the card if I use the "Partition Recovery"option. At this point I havent actually been able to recover the files without buying a premium version of the software.

Another concern is that it looks like the apps only recover known file types, so I'm not sure if it will even be able to recover the MPC sequence/program files. Yet another issue is that it looks like filenames are lost. All the WAV files have been renamed to file001.wav, file002.wav, etc.

I'm really crushed here. I've seen data recovery services that specialize in hardware repair of CF cards but they run ~$200. I'm considering it if it will get me back all my data in a way that will be useable on the MPC.
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Re: CF Card stopped being recognised

By Lampdog Mon Feb 03, 2014 3:33 am
Yeah, sometimes your files will be renamed. Sometimes they playback incorrectly, sometimes they just don't play, but most times whole partitions are recovered perfectly, even after multiple partitions. I've had all of those things happen to me before.

Re: CF Card stopped being recognised

By djestouff Mon Feb 03, 2014 5:55 am
I just used the Pro version of Disk Drill and it was basically only able to recover the WAV samples, so I've lost all sequence/program data, as well as the folder structures.

Lampdog wrote:Yeah, sometimes your files will be renamed. Sometimes they playback incorrectly, sometimes they just don't play, but most times whole partitions are recovered perfectly, even after multiple partitions. I've had all of those things happen to me before.


have you ever payed to use one of the data recovery services? do you think they would be able to give better results than the software options?
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