[GLLUG] CF Card Conundrum

[Marr]

On Saturday 03 January 2009 3:36:08pm Chick Tower wrote:
> A friend gave me an old HP Photosmart 315 digital camera.  It has a
> 128MB Sandisk CF card (or is it called a disk?) in it.  I can connect it
> to my PC and mount it the same way I would a flash drive, but I can't
> see all the files that are stored on it.  The df command shows it's
> capacity as three or four megabytes less than the 128 it is when I mount
> it.  fdisk -l shows only one partition on it, formatted as FAT16.  I
> know there are other photos on it because I can view a dozen of them
> through the camera's menu system on its LCD screen.  I would like to
> save a couple of them and then reformat the card, to see if I can
> eliminate this problem, but I can't access the dozen files from my PC.
> I did find a note on the web that the software that comes with Windows
> XP and (Vista or 2000) cannot access any CF cards in this camera greater
> than 32MB in capacity without using a CF card reader, but I don't have
> one to try and I don't care to buy one if I can eliminate the problem.
>
> 1)  Does anyone have any other suggestions I can try to access and copy
> these photos to my PC?

Odd. That model supports "USB Mass Storage" mode, so if you can mount the card 
while it's in the camera, I cannot quite understand why all the photo files 
aren't appearing.

How are you checking for the files on the card? Are you sure there aren't any 
hidden directories? If  'ls -laR /mnt' doesn't show everything on the mounted 
device, then I'm mystified.

If all else fails (before you get a chance to try it with a USB card reader, 
that is), you might want to try accessing the camera with 'gphoto2':

   http://www.gphoto.org

In a quick web search, I saw some inconsistent information about whether that 
particular model is supported by 'gphoto2', but it might be worth a try. 
Having said that, I suspect the "external USB CF card reader" path would be 
faster/easier and maybe more likely to succeed.

FWIW, I have a Kodak DC260 camera that I used to use with a neat photo 
viewer/control application that I wrote (and later used what I learned to 
provide a couple of fixes/updates to the 'gphoto2' project), but I found that 
it was just easier to pull the CF card (yes, I also call it a 'card' -- as 
far as I'm concerned, if it doesn't spin, it's not a "disk"/"disc" :^} ) and 
plug it into a USB card reader. These days, my main PC has a neat 
multi-format internal (connected to USB header on motherboard) card reader 
that nicely fits where a floppy diskette drive would normally go. It was 
$7.99 at NewEgg (item #N82E16820609198) back in Feb 2008 and it works like a 
charm under Slackware and even has a USB socket for plugging in a USB flash 
RAM drive.

Good luck and holler if you have any questions....

Bill Marr