CF Card corruption

What causes a CF card to corrupt? I have an old 20d I am letting my kids use. One of the cards recently became corrupted. I think will be able to recover the images using software (suggestions?). After the images are recovered, can I reformat the card and use it again? Is it possible this corrupted card will affect my other cards? I have another card that suddenly became unreadable, good thing I had already backed it up. Could it be a bad card reader? Thanks for your help.

Could be a dodgy reader or even the USB cable that connects it into the PC (I had this once myself). If you have a spare cable swap it and see if it helps.

Have you tried connecting the camera via USB directly to eliminate the camera or card?

I am getting a new reader with new cable to see if this helps. I'll let you know. I tried connecting the camera and the computer doesn't see anything. Keep in mind this is an old 20d. I am NOT going to put this card in my newer camera which is working fine. I'll start with a new card reader. Thanks for your help.

There are lots of points of failure with CF cards. The most common is pin connections. The duty cycle on the pins is far less than the duty cycle on the internals. The connections can fail after just a few hundred sexual encounters with a camera and card reader.

People take cards out of the camera and stick them in their pocket, throw them in a camera bag, or other hostile environments that might introduce dust or other junk into the pin holes. I saw a blog once where a guy captured several people at a workshop holding CF cards in their mouth while doing a swap.

A severly clogged female pin hole on a CF card can bend and destroy the male pins in a camera or card reader.

If a pin hole is clogged, sometimes just removing and re-inserting it clears the problem, leaving you with an unsolved mystery. But if a card fails in more than one reader/camera while other cards work OK in same reader/camera, time to trash the card.

I suspect an old card reader is the culprit because after inspecting it closely I see one of the pins is lower than the others. I threw the reader away. I will be a lot more careful with them in the future. I am also tempted to throw corrupted cards away, especially if they are older ones. Furthermore I do not interchange cards between old cameras and new ones.

Trackerxx wrote in post #18147857
I suspect an old card reader is the culprit because after inspecting it closely I see one of the pins is lower than the others. I threw the reader away. I will be a lot more careful with them in the future. I am also tempted to throw corrupted cards away, especially if they are older ones. Furthermore I do not interchange cards between old cameras and new ones.

Good call on throwing it away. Memory is absolutely dirt cheap nowadays, especially for cards fast enough for the 20D. You should be able to get a memory card for $10 if buying used.

Cheers,
Bryan

+1 on throwing the card away.

Aside from the low cost of memory now, and aside from mechanical (e.g. bent pin) issues, flash memory actually does not have a very long lifespan measured in re-writes to the same bit cells. A lot of work goes into flash memories to control the address space to minimize re-writes. That means, it just goes bad after a while, I've had SD cards go bad.

In a thread above re: which card for back, the op said never had an issue with bent pins after thousands of insertions. I'd say he is about due!

ardeekay wrote in post #18168460
In a thread above re: which card for back, the op said never had an issue with bent pins after thousands of insertions. I'd say he is about due!

Actually he said "tens of thousands of times" so he really is overdue. But to be honest I never experienced a problem with CF cards either, but as an engineer I know that things like a CF card into a card slot are designed (or should be) to go together with minimal insertion force. I don't generally apply a great deal of force to small objects. That being said sooner or later pins will fail in either the camera or the card reader (if used). I also use direct cable to PC transfer, so likely the card in my camera has been there for several months.