CF microdrive gone bad....any tricks?

[nosmohtac]

Hi, I purchased my first Microdrive (and possibly my last) a few months ago, and I just got around to putting some movies for my PPC on it.
After a reformat to FAT32, I installed a couple of movies on it and tested them out on my loox 720. I installed a few more movies on it and tried to look at them on my PPC and it wouldn't appear in file explorer. I went to try it in my card reader again and I couldn't get the computer to recognize the card either.

Has anyone here had similar problems with a microdrive, and were you able to get it working again, or is the MD garbage now?
I just thought there may be some trick that I don't know about.
TIA for any advice.

[JDTagish]

There have been some bad microdrives out there...some by MagicStor are notorious for failing, and they are pretty cheap, so they attract a bunch of sales.

I have a Hitachi 4g MD, and one day, it just quit. It worked in the morning, and then in the afternoon it wasn't recognized in the device. I tried it in card reader and no luck there either. I called Hitachi, and they checked the SN, and it came back as an OEM drive (meaning they thought it had been pulled out of another device like a Rio) but it wasn't, and I did have the receipt from CompUSA where I purchased it. The downside from Hitachi was they wanted me to actually take a photocopy of the actual microdrive and then the receipt fo they could verify the serial number, and then they would check their records, and eventually I might have gotten a replacement from overseas because they were out of stock in the US.

Not wanting to go through all that, I drove over to my CompUSA and they replaced it on the spot.

Nowhere in all that did anyone have any explaination as to why the drive might have just died tho...they only said that it "just happens" sometimes.

Depending on where you bought it, you may want to see if you can have it replaced, or exchange it for a regular CF card.

I have loved my MD, but next time, I will probably get a regular CF card, just because there are no moving parts to just "die."