MP3 players forum: Creative Zen & SD cards problems

Hi guys. I bought a Zen 8gb 3 months ago to replace my old Zen Nano.

I'm really happy of my choice and I've never had problems with it since now.

Considered that buying a Zen 8gb with a SD card 8gb I saved > 50 than buying the 16gb zen i decided to do so.

This tuesday I bought a PEAK SDHC 8gb class 6 card. I put it in the zen, went to the "removeable disc" section, connected the USB cable to the pc, copied some videos, and it was working. I spent the rest of the evening converting files and copying them to the SD card.

After some time, while I was doing other things, I noticed that explorer and the copy of the files where stuck. I killed explorer, removed the USB cable but the ZEN was still saying "Do not disconnect". So I removed the SD card and the Zen's screen went black. I resetted it, inserted the card back and connected it to the PC, discovering that my SD card was downgraded from 8gb of space to 3.75gb and it had become unformattable.

After a lot of googling i found the problem. The MBR of the SD was corrupted. So I downloaded a nice program called testdisk and tried to fix it. Infact it said that the geometry of the disc (cylinders heads sectors) was something like 468C 256H 63S (468*256*63*512 = 3.75gb circa).

So I tried to set the geometry as it should have been (1024 cylinders instead of 468), to get back the lost 4.25gb. No way. Anytime I set it, then removed the card and put it back in it was as before.

The next day I went to the shop and they replaced it.

The new one lasted 2 days. Yesterday evening I was still copying videos in it and I got stuck for no reason. Disconnected, resetted the Zen, etc. When I put the card back in it was veeeery slooow but the Zen was still able to read it (after saying "The disc is corrupted, maybe after an unsafe removal" ) .

I connected the USB and launched a scandisk on the SD card. It was almost complete but then said "Unable to complete the task" and I got an i/o error.

Disconnected etc. The card is now unreadable. From windows explorer it says "Insert disc into drive please". From testdisk I can read the MBR and it gives me 8GB correctly, but no partitions, and if I try to modify anything it gives me writing errors.



Help needed.