PC cards again

First of all hello everybody.

I lately purchased an LG Phenom running Win CE 1.0 and I spent some time trying to use a PC card with it. The PC card adapter is a Sony Stick adapter with a 64 MB stick. Model number is MSAC-PC2 and it is listed as compatible with any Win CE system.
Now here's what happens: I formatted the card FAT an my PC and then inserted it into the Phenom. After a short while, the Phenom tells me that he found the card and that he'd like to format it. If I click "yes", he'll declare himself unable to format the card, if I click no, nothing happens. The card is unlocked and I have no trouble formatting it again and again and playing files on it on my desktop PC. I tried everything I could find here including the PC card thread below in this forum.

My idea is that maybe a 64 MB card is too large for Win CE 1.0?

Any clues?

Edited by headsign 2009-10-14 7:39 AM

I would check the pins in the card slot of the H/PC for imposion or bent contacts. CE1 will take 64MB fine.

The pins are fine. The HPC is brand new. The PC card also seems to be fine. It worked well last time I put it into a laptop.

The fact that it's working on the PC suggests that it should be working.

If you are using NT for format it, it could be screwing about with the cluster size - best to get DOS or CE to do it. Otherwise my money is on the device.

I used XP to format it, I used DOS to format it and I used OS X to format it (to FAT format of course). No luck. I screwed around with the cluster size and I used the default size. Again, no luck.
Of course, I tried to format the card with CE many times aswell but that always returned an error.

Edited by headsign 2009-10-14 10:49 AM

I've had similar problems with a couple of my CF cards. With my other cards, reformatting solves the problem, but on those one or two cards the problem persists. A few other things you might try:

1) run chkdsk.exe /f on your PC with the card as the target drive;

2) try formatting the card in a digital camera that has a CF slot; or

3) hard reset the Phenom in case something is causing atadisk.dll not to execute properly.

I tried suggestion 1) and chkdsk returned an error so I reformatted the card and next ran chkdsk. Everything OK. FAT formatted device, etc.
I inserted the card into the Phenom and now it doesn't even see it anymore.
Suggestion 2) is infeasible for now due to my niece still being in posession of the camera's charging unit

Hard resetting the unit would mean taking all batteries out including the backup battery?

Is it possible to partition the card and just format a small part of it...2mb and see if that works with the Phenom. One thing I've noticed on a couple of my old handhelds is that if I use a large storage card, it takes longer to read it than a smaller one...sometimes taking a couple minutes to show up on the desktop...

Or maybe it is simply a hardware compatibility issue with your adapter...

Let me make sure I'm clear about this. Is this a Sony Memory Stick card in a PCMCIA adapter?

Possibly all I need to do is wait much longer until the card is read? I will try this.
I tried to partition only 8MB of the card before, leaving the rest unformatted, but it didn't work any better.
For the moment my next problem is connectivity. OS X->Win 98 (previously XP)->USBtoRS232->WinCE ...quite a task

...21.02: did it...yippee!

Edited by headsign 2009-10-15 3:03 PM