Comments on: Olympus SmartMedia Card Error: Repairing/Recovering Corrupted Cards

By: dirk

dirk — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:13:21 +0000

I’m here to tell you the easy way to fix corrupt smart media cards…. providing you have a Windows 98 OS – or you have access to one.

use your card reader to plug into the USB port on your Win98 machine.
Open My Computer, and view the device…. on mine, it was drive E:
RIGHT click – select FORMAT
Run a FULL Format
should take a few minutes (you’ll see the SMPREP program initiate and run)
when it’s done, insert the card into your camera, and it will reformat your card….

Ta-da !!

of course, this is assuming you have a Win98 still hanging around.

go to your geeky brother-in-law who is too cheap to upgrade – or your Mom or Grandma – still stuck with the old hand-me-down computers……

By: alan Groening

alan Groening — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 17:53:55 +0000

Please help… I have an Olympus XD-picture card type M+ 1GB high speed, after dumping the entire contents on the card onto my PC, and deleting the files, the card reads CARD FULL and reformatting doesnt do anything to fix the problem. I have reformatted the card several times and I’m still getting the CARD FULL error.

(this is NOT the smartmedia card so I doubt that these two low_level_format.exe files would work properly)

By: M-M

M-M — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 09:32:58 +0000

Yet another “HURRAAH!” for Low_Level_Format.exe! It fixed my 128 mb smarmedia card that I had been using in my Olympus C-3030 and ruined it with my Windows XP.

The first time I tried to run it though it gave me an error after a while, saying something like “Can not do surface scan” or something like that. I ran it the second time and it went through without trouble!

By: Javier Basilio

Javier Basilio — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:09:36 +0000

I’ve broken my two Smartmedia cards for use them on my Olympus D-380 camera while reading it with my PQI TravelFlash USB 2.0 reader. PQI support didn’t help me.

It seems very hard to buy a reader that is compatible with LOWLEVELFORMAT.EXE or FLASHRANGER.EXE nowadays, until I discover “VIVANCO HIGH SPEED USB 2.0 38in1 reader”. A friend of mine bought it on Pc City in Spain. It works fine with the two utilities. I just fixed my cards.

By: PoisonPen

PoisonPen — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 01:40:34 +0000

Just another vote here for low_level_format.exe – it brought back a 128mb card I had just about written off as dead.

By: Edric

Edric — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:59:18 +0000

Hi all. I too had the same problem (on 2 olympus xd acrds) and after trying all the possible solutions (aperase, smprep, smformat, etc.) I finally found one working application that helped me solve this problem. Download Flashdoctor from here http://driver.zol.com.cn/detail/10/95395.shtml

Be sure to recover/copy first your xd card’s contents to your PC. Insert your xd card into a card reader connected to your PC then run Flashdoctor. Format your xd card using this tool then insert it back in your camera, voila! I formatted my xd cards again through the camera just to be sure, now everything’s working fine. Hope this helps as it helped me. Good day!

By: Joseph

Joseph — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 06:17:33 +0000

Hey Malcolm. You can do the formatting yourself instead of sending the cards off. Check out http://olypan.quotaless.com for details on how to use the Low_Level_Format.exe (mentioned earlier on this page) to format both SmartMedia cards and xD cards. It works like a charm, fixes “dead” cards, and you can enable Oly Pano with it too. Best of all, it might be free if your current reader supports it. Enjoy!

By: Malcolm

Malcolm — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 14:00:19 +0000

I have had several SmartMedia cards die for no reason except that they gave up! However I found a rapair service at http://www.massgsm.com/smartmediacard.html and they all now work great even have the Olympus Pan working.

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 03:39:46 +0000

Sorry, I wasn’t clear above, when I said “this program”, I meant the one at http://anysite.h16.ru.

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 03:38:33 +0000

Anybody used this program with an XD card yet? Specifically interested in doing a low level format of a non-Olympus XD card and making it look like Olympus to enable panorama. Right now all my XD cards are already Olympus, so I need to buy a non-Olympus to experiment with. Not sure if they get “fixed” the same way as the SM cards do (putting in the OLYMPUS PAN 2.0 header), but I do see the same 01 03 D9 01 FF code inside this EXE so I’m thinking maybe it could work.