SD Card Woes on Kodak CX6330

I have an older Kodak EasyShare CX6330 camera that has served me well for about five years. Because 8g SD cards have become relatively inexpensive, I decided to upgrade from a 2g. I bought an 8gb Transcend SD card and loaded it into the camera. The camera goes into a perpetual state of "Memory Card Requires Formatting" and then the card doesn't work in any other device--including a card reader plugged into a PC. Believing I received a card that was DOA, I borrowed a friend's SanDisk 4gb (which they have been using in their new camera for several months) and, since installing it in my camera, it now has the same problem--dead! The manual for my camera has no mention of an upper limit on SD card size (at least not that I could find); however, when I bought the camera, a 512mb card would have been considered huge.

Now neither the 4g nor the 8g card will format in my SD card reader on the computer. If I attempt to open Disk Management on my Vista computer, while either card is inserted, Disk Management completely locks up until I remove the card from the reader. Same thing happens if I use the "DISKPART" command from the CLI. For this reason, I cannot attempt to delete the partition and create a new one. A CLI format attempt on the card from the PC also locks up. I tried the SD card formatting utility to no avail...

http://www.sdcard.org/consumers/formatter/
http://panasonic.jp/support/global/cs/sd/download/sd_formatter.html

There is a v1.03 firmware upgrade for this camera but, according to Kodak's website it only addresses "Focus issue that sometimes occurs on first image following powerup" and "Image distortion that occurs when using digital zoom when set to 3:2 Quality setting". There's no mention of memory card size in the firmware notes, so I didn't apply it to my camera.

If you own this camera, I wouldn't recommend trying to go above a 2g SD card. (Incidentally, my 2g card continues to function in the camera with no issues.) I'm looking for answers to the following questions:

1.) If anyone owns this same camera, have you been able to get anything above a 2g SD card to work?
2.) Is there method, outside of those mentioned above, to restore functionality to a toasted SD card?

Thanks!

 

I didn't realize that the technology changed in SD cards with the introduction of SDHC. An incompatibility with HC is probably what I'm encountering...

"Secure Digital card." Wikipedia. 2009. 3 Mar. 2009 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital_card>

 

As I stated in my original post, I didn't see an upper limit for SD anywhere in the camera's manual. (Again, that would have been long before SDHC.) For the price of the true 4g SD card, I think I'd rather spend about 1/3 of that for two 2g cards totaling the same storage space. I supposed I could ask Kodak if there are any future plans to release a firmware update for the camera which would support SDHC but, on a 5+ year old camera, I doubt it's high on their priority list. Thanks for the follow up, though.

If anyone has any suggestions on reviving the 4g and 8g cards that my camera had for lunch, I'm still all ears.

 

I have successfully formatted a smaller (512mb) SD card in my reader before, using the Windows native format command; however, attempting to format the damaged 4g and 8g SDHC cards were the only attempts since that time. Unfortunately, the article you shared refers to the Panasonic SDFormatter (v2.0.0.3) mentioned in my original post which didn't work--that formatter never recognizes the damaged cards. But thanks for follow up!