Weird issue with SD card. Camera can read it, PC can't

[Capt. Vulcan]

So I have an SD card that I use for my e-reader. I got a new camera and it takes SD cards so I just used the one in the e-reader. Took pictures fine. I put the card back in the e-reader and all of a sudden it says the card is corrupted. I put it in my PC card reader to see if I can scan it and the system just works endlessly when I select it without ever actually seeing the card contents. I put the card back in the camera... and it's working fine. In fact I can see all the contents using the camera usb cord and I was able to save all my e-reader files. I did every scan I can think of on the card and everything comes up rosy. But nothing else can read the card anymore.

So what's going on here? Is the camera putting some custom format on the card automatically that makes it unreadable to anything else? I'm going to reformat, but I'd hate to have to re-format every single time I put the SD card in my camera.

Details:
PNY 8gb sdhc card
Panasonic Lumix DMC-FP1
Pandigital Novel
Sandisk card reader
Windows 7

 

[Capt. Vulcan]

A quick update. Even after a format the card is only readable by the camera. When placed in a card reader the whole reader get's stuck and every other card cannot be accessed till I pull the SD card out. When in the E-reader it comes up a corrupted.

really confused by this. Is the card damaged in some higher function area that the simple camera doesn't access? Every scan on the card comes back with a perfectly healthy memory card. It worked fine till I put it in my digital camera, and now it's hopelessly bonded with it.

 

[Jadzia]

The card may be damaged somehow, and your camera examines it with much less rigor than computer hardware does, so the camera doesn't see that it is damaged.

I had a usb stick that behaved a similar way. It wouldn't mount. Then after reformatting, it was readable by only one device I owned. I wrote a few files to it, but it failed again a couple of days later, refusing to mount on any device and refusing to be reformatted.

The moral of the story is that flash memory is fragile and can fail at any time. It is less reliable than hard disk in my opinion.

 

[Arrqh]

I think it's less likely that the card is damaged and more likely that your card reader on your PC is not compatible with SDHC cards.

In fact this is exactly what I see on my PC with my 16gb SDHC card. It works perfectly fine in my camera and also perfectly fine in my laptop. But when I try and use it with my older card reader on my desktop which is not compatible with newer SDHC cards, it just sits there trying to read forever without ever giving me an error why.

 

[Capt. Vulcan]

I think that may be it. I swear I used the card reader before to load the custom firmware on the e-reader, but maybe I used the e-reader usb interface. Once I formatted and copied over the e-reader files, the e-reader read the card fine but the card reader still couldn't read it. thanks!

 

[JustAFriend]

My laptop is older and wont read sdhc cards,
while my new netbook handles them easily.

You can get a usb sdhc adapter for $10 and that
solved the problem with my older laptop.