SD Card Woes -- HELP!!!

Armanius

Bring Jack back!
Location
Houston, Texas
Name
Jack
This past weekend, my M9 kept locking up right after taking a shot and presumably during card writeup. After taking a shot, it would just lock up. The red light that shows powering up/writing to card wasn't blinking though. None of the buttons would work. I removed the battery and put it back in. When I turned it back on, the red light did blink. All the functions and buttons worked properly, except for the playback button. As soon as I hit the playback button, the M9 would freeze again, and all buttons became non responsive again. The process was repeatable -- take battery out and put it back in; turn back on; all buttons work until I hit play. If I tried to take a photo, the camera also froze right after the shutter press.

So some moments later, after repeating the process, the camera starts working again. I'm able to see the photos when pushing playback. I am able to take more photos. BUT, then same thing happens again.

I was using an 8 gig SansDisk Ultra Extreme Pro SD card with 45mps speed. So I switched to a PNY card that was a little slower. Everything worked fine again. But then, I had the same lock up again ... Repeated the taking out the battery process, blah blah blah. Then camera worked fine again.

Got home, downloaded the photos of the PNY card into iMac. All photos there. No problem.

Put the SansDisk card in the iMac, and iMac didn't even recognize the existence of the card. Put it in the PC desktop, the PC saw the drive "E", but when I clicked on it, it would try to read, and then eventually give up trying to read the SansDisk card. This isn't a situation where there's an empty folder or an empty card. My computers can't even read the card.

Any ideas on how to rescue the DNG files from the SansDisk SD card?? HELP!!!!
 
I googled "recovering DNG files from corrupted SD card" and there were some hits about some software for recovering data. But there just weren't any reviews for those programs like "MagicCute". So don't even know if the software is legit.
 
OK.....found it. It was a couple years ago. But I tried many different programs, but the one that seemed to do the most complete job was called Diskdigger.....it was freeware or shareware, but I remember at the time I made a donation since I was so pleased. Good luck.
 
Thanks BB, Luke and Will.

Luke, DiskDigger worked!!! YES!!! Thank you!! Used it on the PC. Had to do a little work-around to get it to work though. Initially, the software also couldn't even detect the existence of the SD card. So I inserted a working SD card also with M9 DNG files. I refreshed DiskDigger, and it detected the working SD card. I then removed the working SD card, and placed the corrupted one in there, but did NOT refresh it. Started the scanning that way, and it worked. It was able to recover all the DNG files as far as I could tell.

I guess now the question is ... is there something wrong with the camera that's causing this problem. This NEVER happened to me before on the M9. Uuuurghhh ... But it's nice to know that there's a way to recover them.

Thanks again everyone!
 
wasn't this a known problem on the m9 with sandisk extreme. I seem to remember reading about it somewhere, I think there was a firmware update?
 
wasn't this a known problem on the m9 with sandisk extreme. I seem to remember reading about it somewhere, I think there was a firmware update?

Not sure. But I started having some lockup problems with the PNY card as well. I'll look into that. It would totally byte if I keep running into this problem. Never happened before though.

If you have registered your SD card you should be eligible for a "RescuePRO" download by SanDisk. SanDisk® RescuePRO® Extreme Offer | LC Technology Portal

I haven't used this yet, but this info was in a slip card in the SanDisk packaging.

I never registered any of my cards. And I trashed all the packaging already. I suppose I better start paying attention to this stuff. Thanks!
 
What version of firmware is your M9? The latest fixes a number of problems with SD cards.

On the SanDisk UHS-1 cards: they are not reliable. I am on my third replacement card- direct from Sandisk, use it only in the EP2 and can only read it with a SanDisk USB card reader. That card has never been in my M9 or M8, and the last failed while trying to format it with the format utility from SDCARD.ORG used in a Sandisk reader. My HP Pavillion card slot does not recognize it, and a Dell could write to it- but all data was corrupt on read.

A salesman at a local electronics store told me that quite a few of their cameras had problems with it, and he steered people away from them.
 
What version of firmware is your M9? The latest fixes a number of problems with SD cards.

On the SanDisk UHS-1 cards: they are not reliable. I am on my third replacement card- direct from Sandisk, use it only in the EP2 and can only read it with a SanDisk USB card reader. That card has never been in my M9 or M8, and the last failed while trying to format it with the format utility from SDCARD.ORG used in a Sandisk reader. My HP Pavillion card slot does not recognize it, and a Dell could write to it- but all data was corrupt on read.

A salesman at a local electronics store told me that quite a few of their cameras had problems with it, and he steered people away from them.

It's not the 1.174 for sure. I've been trying to locate a list of all the firmware upgrades for the M9, and which one does what. But can't find something like that anywhere.
 
I'm running 1.174, have not had any problems with it. 1.138 seemed faster writing files, and worked well with my older cards. I suspect the newer, faster cards are "not quite to spec", cheating to get faster writing speeds when running benchmarks. 1.162 was very slow.

1.174 has been out for a while, and should be a safe upgrade.
 
Sorry to hear this Armanius!

Honestly I'm thinking that Leica really doesn't know what they are doing in terms of electronics and software, sorry. At first they blaimed Sandisk and later they had to apologize because millions of Sandisk cards are working...in different cameras.

Appr. one year ago Leica asked their customers to support to solve this issue but as a result the new firmware has a bad behavior. M9 users downgrade their firmware to version 1.62 this helps in most cases.
Another solution might be to use Panasonic Gold cards, but at the end there is a big portion of MoJo because Leica has no man power to program this stuff, they use the ex East German RObotron people. Some friction between both parties may be there.....

Here is the link to the Leica forum - Good Luck!

M9 still freezing with Sandisk card - Leica User Forum
 
The Sandisk card IS the problem, it is not compatible with the SD Card specifications.

I've been through enough of them to know, replaced by SanDisk as "FAILED", and have never been in my M9.

Sandisk UHS-1 cards should be avoided. I have never had an issue with PNY cards and older SanDisk cards in the M9. I've used Sandisk memory cards in digital cameras since the 4MByte PCMCIA cards in a Kodak DC-50. The UHS-1 Sandisk cards are the most unreliable cards that I have ever used. They failed in my computer by just writing files to the card, using a Sandisk card reader bought at the same time as the SD Card. It is not Leica's fault, many cameras have problems with them, the cards are pure crap.
 
Here is the thread on my experience with the Sandisk UHS-1 cards:

Sandisk 8GByte Extreme Pro: will not work with my EP-2, CX-1, or WIN7 machine. - Rangefinderforum.com

The card worked with the M8, read all the files off of the card, then formatted the card with WIN7 pro. Killed the Card.
Second card, formatted using a Sandisk card reader with SDFORMAT from the SDCARD.ORG site that controls specifications for SD cards. That killed the card. It was never in a camera.

Third card- using in an EP2, formatted only in the EP2, read out using only a SANDISK card reader. Yesterday got a "No Card" message on the EP2. This card is a disaster.
 
I have recently been delving into this issue as I need a new card for my M9. From what I have read on another forum the Panasonic Gold cards mentioned above seem to be the safest. Apparently not all M9's have an issue but those that do tend to chew up high speed cards of several different brands (but not the Panasonics) and just because your M9 seems ok now does not mean that it won't develop the problem in the future. I do not have a vested interest here as I have only used Sandisk cards in the past and not had a problem, I would be buying another one now if it wasn't for the potential of disaster. I have not tried the Panasonic cards either so do not have any experience with them but there are quite a lot of users that have and I have only read positive reports.
 
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