Getting card info takes a looong time?

[ender]

What exactly happens when the Z71 is reading information from the SD card? I have a SanDisk 256M SD card, and it works fine. When it's empty, the info from the card displays pretty quickly, but now that I've loaded it almost full w/ mp3's (~20M left), the CardInfo program takes forever to read the card. I've left it on for at least 15 minutes, and the screen just shows "Please Wait."

However, if I eject the card while in the "Please Wait" mode, I can briefly see that information from the card was already there. This happens during the half second between card eject and the Z71 turning itself off.

Some info: I loaded the SD card using an external writer instead of thru the hotsync process since the hotsync takes waaaay longer. Does this affect the card somehow? Also, anyone compare upload times for mp3s using QuickSync vs. the RealOne player? I don't have RealOne player installed (avoid extraneous software on my system), but I will consider it if it solves this problem.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[ender]

While in the "Please Wait" mode, I cannot turn off the Z71 w/o ejecting the SD card.

[ender]

No one has experienced this? Perhaps some of you w/ 256M card can try this and let me know whether it's my unit that's defective and should be returned?

Thanks.

[Scarhart]

Hi,

I have the same 256 MB Sandisk card, about 1/3 full of mp3 files. It shows up in the info screen fairly quickly, but does not give details of the files (only # and volume).

Nothing showed up before I formatted the card using the Zire, though. The card wouldn't sync or anything.

Cheers,

Scott

[ender]

Thanks Scarhart. I did format the card w/ the Zire before loading the songs, though. I still can't figure out why this is happening.

[Pride Of Lions]

...performing a "soft reset" on your Zire71 with the offending card in it?

I've found this to unravel card weirdness from time to time.

A "Soft reset" is when you slide the camera part open and insert a paper clip point into the "Reset" hole WITHOUT pressing on any other knobs or buttons or switches.

Hope this helps.
POL9A

[ender]

Thanks to everyone who replied. I did finally find the problem. It appears that when I copied the MP3s over using the external writer, several errors occured. Basically, several files were copied over, but never 'registered' (if that makes sense). When I was copying the files over, Window98 gave several 'media not ready' (or something similar) errors. I didn't think too much about them until I went ahead and manually deleted all the files out of the SD card, which I had to do because I couldn't access the Format function w/in the Zire.

Once I had done that, the card information was shown in the Zire as 4 files, 230 MB free, even though no files were showing through the external driver, nor available to any programs from the Zire. At this point I formatted the card, and all was fixed.

I finally broke down and installed the RealOne player, and re-loaded the MP3s. No more problems (although I had to restart the transfer to device operations a couple of times).

Hopefully this helps other people who might run into a similar situation.