SD Card Problem in Vista

[waheed]

I own a PDA which I use for mainly to watch movies on long train journeys which uses SD Cards.

Whenever I insert the SD card in my PC running Windows Vista, I keep getting asked:

"You need to format the disk in drive K: before you can use it. Do you want to format it?"

I don't understand why its asking me to format as the card is already formatted and contains media files. It works fine in my PDA (Orange SPV M2000) and I also run a dual boot operating system (Vista/XP Pro) since I have 3 internal SATA hard drives.

Under Windows XP, it works fine, card is recognised and I can copy data fine to it.

Its just under windows Vista I get this problem. Any solutions?

EDIT: Forget to mention that my media card reader/writer is USB 2.0

[jman98]

Under Windows XP, it works fine, card is recognised and I can copy data fine to it.

Its just under windows Vista I get this problem. Any solutions?

Yes. Boot XP and thank God that you were at least smart enough to set up dual boot.

I work in IT for a living. Your post is one of many here that I would hold up to people as a reason NOT to "upgrade" to Vista. Imagine if you will if I said the following to you in all seriousness:

You have the opportunity to upgrade to a new OS. Most of your old programs will work. All won't. Maybe not for months. Maybe not for 6 months. I can't even predict what will and won't work, but I can predict that something you have and care about working won't work. At all. The new OS looks really cool. It won't run any new faster on your PC and it has no features that you can't live without AND, the best part, it will cost you HUNDREDS of dollars to upgrade.

Would you take this deal? Why on earth considering that Microsoft has badly botched EVERY SINGLE OS UPGRADE IN THE COMPANY'S HISTORY did you and so many others think "This time it will be different". I read exactly the same kinds of posts back when XP came out - "My XXXXX won't work now but it used to work in Windows 2000". If you wait one or two or six months, eventually your problem will be fixed by some kind of patch, probably from Microsoft. You can either boot XP and enjoy life or continue to beat your head against the wall with "wonderful" Vista. It's your call.

By the way, this kind of thing is EXACTLY why smart businesses don't upgrade OSes every time Microsoft releases a new version of Windows and they wait a year or more for the bugs to be worked out before they even think of upgrading.

[aedipuss]

you might check the sd cards current format. i would guess it's fat16 which is no longer supported in vista. if you copy off the files and reformat the card to fat32 it should work in all devices.

[waheed]

you might check the sd cards current format. i would guess it's fat16 which is no longer supported in vista. if you copy off the files and reformat the card to fat32 it should work in all devices.

Thanks for the response

Yes, the card is FAT16 which may be the problem. I have another card which is FAT32 which does work in Vista. So following your suggestion will solve the problem.

[guns1inger]

Why on earth considering that Microsoft has badly botched EVERY SINGLE OS UPGRADE IN THE COMPANY'S HISTORY

Brilliantly over-simplified, over-generalised, and just plain wrong. If you expect every OS upgrade to support every possible piece of legacy kit, you are completely insane. The price of moving forward is the sacrifice of some of the past. If you think current OS's are bloated, imagine how bad they would be trying to support every piece of old crap everyone wanted to install.

I run both Vista and XP on different machines. The Vista machine is not capable of running Aero, and that hasn't been an issue. The few items that haven't worked haven't been missed or have been upgraded and now work. I agree that there is nothing hugely compelling about Vista at this point, but I would not call it a disaster of an upgrade by any stretch of any imagination (excluding Mac owners, of course - they have no imagination). The upgrade to XP was also, AFAIAC extremely smooth, having done thousands of machines since it's launch.

[oldandinthe way]

Early adoptors of any technology should expect problems.

Vista is no different than any other new piece of technology.

I'm not going to argue about early adoption other than to say that if you don't expect to have some problems, you probably shouldn't upgrade - because you are a moron.

For the past 40 years the following saying has circulated in the computer industry -

"How do you tell the pioneers? They're the ones with the arrows in their backs."