CF cards showing less space than they should

[aikijay]

I recently was surprised that my camera (1D MArk II) with a 2 gig CF card was saying "CF card full" when it had only 13 RAW images on it. I had a 1 GB card and similar problem. When I got home I put both cards in the card reader attached to my Imac and when I opened the Lexar media icon representing the CF card, it said the 1 GB card was empty but had only 11.7 mb available. The 2 GB card had 458 mb available, but also no files on it. How can this happen and is there a way to restore my CF cards to their full nominal memory space? Thanks a lot for the advice,
Jay

[canonnoob]

have you formatted the cards? in camera? what are your file sizes? jpegs? raw?

[basroil]

Your imac is the fault most likely. OSX has a nasty habit of including a .trashes folder everywhere instead of allowing you to fully delete files on removable drives. Reformat in the camera and it should be back to normal.

[aikijay]

I actually did use the camera menu and deleted all the pictures on the card, and it didn't change anything. I don't know if that's equivalent to "reformatting" per se. Is there another way to reformat? This may sound like a basic question, but what method do you normally use to delete the photos from the card after downloading them (I use RAW and process in DPP) I just drag the files off the card into the trash bin.

[René Damkot]

In the camera there's an option "Format". Both quicker and better then "Delete all".

[tim]

Formatting erases all information in the cards. Delete all removes images the camera put there. They're quite different operations.

[basroil]

Best of all, formatting takes much, much, much less time than deleting photos

[aikijay]

Thanks so much. I used the format option in the menu and it did work. I had actually never used it before.
Jay

[basroil]

Thanks so much. I used the format option in the menu and it did work. I had actually never used it before.
Jay

Always use it, faster, and lowers the risk of card corruption ;)