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[Rachel Cox <rachel AT hesketh.com>]

At 06:24 PM 11/28/2002 -0500, K. Jo Garner wrote:
>Hi,
>
>My mother's digital camera recently bit the dust with an error message
>that prevents it from accessing the card media (it uses Smart Media
>cards).

Isn't that interesting. A lot of people have that problem - is it an 
Olympus, by any chance? I have an Olympus C-3000 zoom and he same thing 
happened to mine. I spent quite a bit of time online looking for the fix. 
There are a couple of possible ones, though neither one worked for me, that 
you might try even if it isn't an Olympus:

http://www.photobuzz.com/_olympus/0000055a.htm
"Here's something I found that fixed the problem - simply inserting the 
card while the camera is on. After doing this everything seems fine and the 
card is recognised but you may find that if you turn the camera off and 
then on again it will still refuse to recognise the card ! In this case 
take the card in and out with the camera on and then format the card in the 
camera (assuming you don't have any pictures you want to keep on it). This 
should solve the cameras problem once and for all - until next time....."

http://www.photobuzz.com/_olympus/00000666.htm
1. Turn off camera, no card, cover CLOSED
2. Turn on camera, wait for no card error
3. Open cover, put in card, close cover
4. Card seen, reformat immediately with camera, twice even...
If I didn't have the cover closed when I turned ON the camera it would not 
see the "bad" card...

Photobuzz also has a general digital photography forum and one for Nikon 
owners:
http://www.photobuzz.com/

My next step, before trying to have it repaired, is to buy a new media card 
and see if it'll recognize that one. I suspect that my Flashpath adapter 
may have corrupted my media cards, but I'm not really sure.Does your mom 
get the pictures off the camera by downloading them directly to the 
computer, or by using either an adapter or a card reader? and have y'all 
tried a brand new media card in the camera?

As for repair, the only place I know of to get Olympus cameras repaired is 
Olympus, to which you'll have to ship the camera, so I'll echo K. Jo's 
request for recommendations for local repair shops.

Best of luck!
-Rachel
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Rachel Cox  |  Web Developer  |  919.834.2552 x16  |  hesketh.com/inc
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