Flash Card Won't Hold Full Capacity

[em2ab]

I'm trying to put pictures on a flash card for a friend of the family so they can use it in a digital picture frame.

Card 1: This was a 1 gig Kodak card and wouldn't copy photos past the 240th photo. I'm trying to copy photos to the card and it'll only take 240 before it tells me the destination file cannot be created. I skip that file and it says that for every file after that. I figure maybe it's just those specific files so I try copying from the bottom up and it'll do 240 again before stopping at the 241st photo once again. So I copy them a row at a time, then when I get close to 240, I copy them one at a time and once again it won't copy more than 240 photos. I figured there was something corrupt with the filesystem so I formatted it and tried it again, same result. I then thought there was something corrupt with the card so I had her return it and she got another.

Card 2: This was a 4 gig Sandisk SDHC and is not compatible with the photo frame so she returned that and I got another.

Card 3: This is a 2 gig Lexar SD card I bought from Staples and gives me the EXACT same result from the Kodak card we had first. It stops after 240 photos.

Any ideas? :confused:

[Grogador]

It's full? How big are the photos? What's the sector size on the cards?

[em2ab]

Definitely not full, the pictures are 90 megabytes total. I put them onto a 128 megabyte Pro Stick Duo and it worked fine. I'm going to go buy a 2 gigabyte Pro Stick Duo this afternoon and see if that works any better. I haven't tried that size yet.

[BlackArcher101]

Try formating it to a different format, either NTFS or FAT32. I had a card which wouldn't accept files, so I thought I'd give it a try with FAT32 and it worked fine after that.

[em2ab]

Originally posted by BlackArcher101
Try formating it to a different format, either NTFS or FAT32. I had a card which wouldn't accept files, so I thought I'd give it a try with FAT32 and it worked fine after that.
Worked perfect, thanks. Why would they format it with FAT and let everyone reformat it when they get it?

[Doozer]

I'm guessing the drive was blank from the manufacturer. I bet the first time it was plugged into a computer it was formatted by that machine, and maybe if it was an older machine, it might've gone with a FAT instead of something a little more up-to-date.

[SpireTECH]

Most sticks come formatted as FAT from the manufacture. This is simply for compatibility reasons. Virtually all operating systems support FAT.

The reason you could only copy 240 files is most likely a limitation of the FAT file system. In the root directory the maximum number of files allowed is 512, assuming each file name is 8-bytes long. For files with longer names that number is reduced.

If your camera and other devices support it, I would use NTFS. It's a much more reliable file system than FAT/FAT32.