Restore Your Microdrive

[Mike Flood]

I have added some important updates to my original document.
These updates attempt to cover using card readers to do low-level format reqired by camera using Microdrives or CompactFlash cards.

http://home.earthlink.net/~amigotech/restore-microdrive.htm

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Mike Flood:cool:

[gdwikoff]

I am new to this forum and have learned a lot since finding it. I need to pick your brain some more. I read your post with interest. I have the "card not initialized" error, however I have no laptop. Is there any way for me to fix this issue with my PC or will I need to send it to IBM? I know now that I will probably switch to CF in the future but since I just recently purchased the camera and microdrive, I need to get some use out of it.
Can you help?

[Mike Flood]

Originally posted by gdwikoff
I am new to this forum and have learned a lot since finding it. I need to pick your brain some more. I read your post with interest. I have the "card not initialized" error, however I have no laptop. Is there any way for me to fix this issue with my PC or will I need to send it to IBM? I know now that I will probably switch to CF in the future but since I just recently purchased the camera and microdrive, I need to get some use out of it.
Can you help?

I don't know if it's possible to talk to the drive in DOS and do an FDISK process via the card reader or not.

I'll check that out. When I got mine going I just let everyone know about the solution and went on to putting out other fires.

As far as changing to CF I think it would still be possible to corrupt the boot sector of the CF card just like it is with the M/D.

[gdwikoff]

I appreciate any help you can give me!

[Mike Flood]

I quickly did a test of the ability to low level format a Microdrive in my firewire (IEEE1394) card reader.

I connected it on my HP 1 Gig Athlon processor based Windows ME system

I dropped to DOS and invoked FDISK
It did see the drive, I was able to delete the parttion on the Microdrive.
Having delted the partition I used FDISK to create a partition.

Then without formatting the Microdrive using my PC I plugged it into the S2.
It reported "card not initialized"

I pressed the menu button (you have to do this for several seconds) and it displayed "Format" I toggled to format, then toggled to "Ok" and pressed the menu button.
S2 formatted the disk and reported the available number of images.

It appears that all that is needed is to delete the active partition on the disk and then create it. PROCEED WITH CAUTION. Make sure the disk you've selected is not one in your system.

I don't know if this process can be done on USB reader.

I then decided to prowl around in Windows XP. In XP, FDISK is now called DISKPART.
It will allow you do manage (and totally screw it up too I suppose) the hard drives on your system.
BUT it doesn't see the firewire card reader present on my XP machine.
So if you are using XP and unless you can get someone with a Win 98 or Win ME machine you'll not be able to restore the partition on your M/D.

Good luck

[gdwikoff]

Thanks again for your help. I'm running XP but have a friend with ME on her PC. I'll let you know how it goes!
Thanks again