IlCapitan Posted February 20, 2008 Share Posted February 20, 2008 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. Quote Link to comment
+Red90 Posted February 20, 2008 Share Posted February 20, 2008 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. Quote Link to comment
IlCapitan Posted February 25, 2008 Author Share Posted February 25, 2008 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 Quote Link to comment
+Chuy! Posted February 26, 2008 Share Posted February 26, 2008 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. Quote Link to comment
IlCapitan Posted February 27, 2008 Author Share Posted February 27, 2008 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! Quote Link to comment
+IBcrashen Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 Have you tried a data recovery program? Quote Link to comment
-Oz- Posted February 28, 2008 Share Posted February 28, 2008 (edited) 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 February 28, 2008 by -Oz- Quote Link to comment
dopoka Posted February 28, 2008 Share Posted February 28, 2008 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. Quote Link to comment
+IBcrashen Posted February 28, 2008 Share Posted February 28, 2008 (edited) 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 February 28, 2008 by IBcrashen Quote Link to comment
superduty1 Posted February 28, 2008 Share Posted February 28, 2008 Sounds like you need to buy a new card and then do the whole trek again. Quote Link to comment
+v2lek Posted February 28, 2008 Share Posted February 28, 2008 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. Quote Link to comment
xxgg Posted February 28, 2008 Share Posted February 28, 2008 Before you use one of those data recovery softwares... you should ask the software developers if it is recommended to be used on a flash drives. Because some of them are not recommended to be used with solid state drives. Quote Link to comment
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