CF Card Utility to Check Integrity?

[Mark_48]

Anyone know of a PC based utility to check the file writing and reading integrity of a CF card, preferably a freebie. I'm not sure WinXP's error checking is thorough enough and whether it might hose up a card with its FAT32 system. I sort of remember back in the days of DOS and Win3.1 there were some tools to check hard drives and floppies by writing and reading back data and then reporting the number of errors.

[Nightcrawler]

That would be an easy enough program to write in most any language.

[robertwgross]

The Windows XP disk checking utility is good enough for ordinary stuff, and it can operate on FAT32 or NTFS or whatever you have.

---Bob Gross---

[tim]

I'm told a program called Spinrite can do this, but it's not free and you need a card reader. I don't think XP does the write/read thing to check if data's stored reliably.

[robertwgross]

Spinrite and all those utilities were good back in the old days when they worked purely on rotating media.

However, compact flash cards use semiconductor technology and there is nothing rotating. The file system used is much the same, but the read/write technology is so much different that rotating media utilities are not that useful.

It is much easier to write a large file to the CF card, then read it off and do a compare. Or, the XP tools can do it good enough.

---Bob Gross---