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Transflash memory card gone bad, 60CSx


IlCapitan

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I have recently come home from a trip to Nepal and India. In Nepal

I trekked 25 days in the Annapurnas and always had my Garmin 60CSx

on to record a full trace for later use.

 

Occasionally I checked my traces in the GPS, and they were all there,

one for each day. Later I traveled in India for 2 months and only used

the GPS once in a while, in cities and such, to find my way back home.

 

Once back at home I attempted to download traces and waypoints. But

Mapsource says it can not find any data card to download from. When

I try to load maps onto the GPS I get a similar message, no data card found.

Other programs, like Oziexplorer fail as well.

 

I had the GPS set up to store traces to the data card,and to wrap when full.

It was a Transflash 512 MB card. IIRC I removed all maps from the card

before leaving on that trip so as to make space for the traces. Only the

original basemap, was there.

 

At no time during the trip did I remove the card. It was well in its slot and

properly locked.

I have tried reading it through a separate card reader, but that fails as well.

When replacing the card with the original 64 MB card all works well. So it seems

the 512MB Transflash has somehow gone bad.

 

Such a card does not cost much anymore. I am not overly concerned with

the cost of a new one, and it may even be replaced on its warranty. But I

really miss the traces that I took so much pains to record, and spent a bunch

of batteries on.

 

My suspicion is that that the card became full with traces and then croaked.

All in all I had it running abt 150 hrs during the trek, and then maybe another

50 hrs while in India.

 

I have polished the cards contacts lightly with a cotton cloth, but to no avail.

 

Any suggestions much appreciated.

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Mapsource has no way to load the tracklogs directly from the card. You need to mount the unit as a drive or put the card into a card reader. Then find the GPX files, copy them to your computer and open in Mapsource.

 

It should not be full. The tracks take up very little room. I would send it to a computer store and have them see if they can recover the data. There are utilities out there to do this.

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It should not be full. The tracks take up very little room.

 

Thank you for clearing that one up. I bought some electro cleaner and

cleaned up all involved contacts. Still no go.

 

I had hoped there would be some comment on the likelihood of memory

card failure, just out of the blue. They are supposed to be quite reliable

are the not? This one had worked fine for a couple of years.

 

Lars

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To reiterate, MapSource can only read from the GPS internal memory.

 

Did you try reading from the GPS in Mass Storage Mode? If it didn't

work form a card reader, it may not matter but it's worth a shot.

 

Yes, I have tried that too. No good. Think I will just give up on it.

 

So I will need to buy a new card. I don't feel like getting another one

of the same brand though.

 

Thanks for your input!

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Have you tried a data recovery program?

Those normally don't work on flash memory. It needs a different procedure than magnetized hard drives.

 

And chances are if a card becomes full it won't just "croak". Chances are that the brand of memory you got was kinda cheap and failed due to that. Also, the tracks are pretty small. If you only went like 150hrs thats only a few megabytes. I did just get a 2gb card of newegg (kingston) with adapters for ~$15 shipped.

Edited by -Oz-
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The NAND Flash used in these cards are not considered extremely reliable. I design electronics and we use NAND Flash only to store data, but never use it to store Boot or OS code. If you look at the spec for most NAND flash the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) is actually surprisingly low. I'm not surprised you could see this type of failure on a two year old card.

 

If you're interested, just Google "NAND flash reliability" and you'll find thousands of pages on this topic.

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Have you tried a data recovery program?

Those normally don't work on flash memory. It needs a different procedure than magnetized hard drives.

 

They do make them just for flash drives. Its just how much is it worth to ya. 30 trails periods are our friends.

Edited by IBcrashen
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Did you try reading from the GPS in Mass Storage Mode? If it didn't

work form a card reader, it may not matter but it's worth a shot.

Yes, I have tried that too. No good. Think I will just give up on it.

 

Hi,

 

Just to make sure, when you put the card in a reader or connect it as a mass storage device, with your GPSr, can you browse the contents of the card using windows file explorer or any other similar software? Do you see bunch of .gpx files there, with dates like 20080131 for their name ? Can you copy them to your computer using windows, not garmin software?

 

if you can - then youre all set. If you can not - well. then it really means that card has gone bad.

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