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Format 373

machines, who knows what format it will use? A Windows PC might use
NTFS, FAT32, or FAT16 formats; whereas a Mac might use HFS+. But
when your camera formats a card, it will use the Microsoft FAT32 format,
which seems to be the lowest-common denominator as far as formats go –
everyone can read it. (Unless, of course, you’ve inserted an SDXC card,
which can hold so much data that FAT32’s card catalog isn’t big enough to
address all of it. And so this specific type of memory card requires the
exFAT file system, which your computer needs to know how to read if
you’re going to be extracting files off of it.)

So that’s where the advice came from: It was easier to say “Just format it in
the camera” instead of giving a bewildering technical explanation and
saying what I’m going to say next: Should extreme corruption occur on
your memory card, your best course of action to make the card usable again
is to format it on your computer and specify FAT32 and disable the “Quick
format” option. Why? Because a thorough format will identify and map
out the bad memory locations on your card, whereas a quick format might
keep the bad memory blocks active, leaving them free to once again ruin
one or more of your important shots.

TIP #1: The new SDXC memory cards MUST be formatted in your camera, since
they use the exFAT file system which most computers are ignorant of.
TIP #2: There do exist “undelete” programs which scour through your
memory and try to recover the actual data that’s still there (if it hasn’t been
overwritten or thoroughly formatted); there also exists image recovery
software that can try to recover as much of that image as it can in the case of
a corrupted memory card (this is not a rare event – sometimes it pays to shoot
RAW+JPG so at least if one image gets corrupted you’ll probably still be able to
read the other.) I know that Lexar brand memory cards come with an example
of the latter software on the CF card for free – so it’s worth getting at least one
of their cards. Other freebies that have a good reputation are:
“Recuva” from Pirisoft: http://tinyurl.com/c3eosk

Transcend memory test utilities: http://tinyurl.com/7buzlv2