Paul's Comments

I have found out that it's not a good idea to do any editing of files stored on removable media, specifically an SD card. I first tried to connect the camera via a USB cable. Either it's the wrong cable or the USB connection isn't quite working. I suspect the former; I discovered that there are apparently more than one kind of mini-USB connector, the mini and the sub-mini that's a little smaller. I think the USB cable I was using was for a different device and is sub-mini. Well, even after unplugging I had to pull the batteries to get the camera to shut off.

So, anyway, I pull the SD card from the (now shut down) camera and put it in the USB SD reader I bought from Micro Center for about $1.50. And it reads the card fine, I can see all the pictures. (This camera creates JPEGs, and Windows XP can show thumbnails of image files that are not damaged when viewing a directory.) So I decide to do a little "surgery" on those files. One of the pictures I decide to crop. At this point I decide to do a few renames of files, at which point some of them "disappear" in that they become 0-byte files, or on some of the files I see a generic picture icon instead of a thumbnail of the image. Not good. Other video files have become corrupted as I discover later, when I try to copy them, I get an error.

So I decide to copy and save what I can to my hard drive. Well, Windows has this nasty habit, if you drag-and-drop files or use explorer to move or copy them, if any file is bad, once it gets to that file, it quits with an error message. Doesn't matter if it's on file #6 of 307,431 files to copy, instead of flagging an error, it just throws up its hands in disgust and quits. Using the command line works better, as bad files are simply flagged. I then reformatted the media, and then had the camera format it for good measure.

But I realize now never to do that again, if I am reading a piece of media, copy the files and edit or rename them on my computer, not on the media. I suspect the ultra-cheap USB SD card converter doesn't do writes very well. I mean, I have never had this problem with external hard drives or jump drives. So that may be the problem. I mean, electronics have gotten lots cheaper over the years, but when a device sells at retail for under $2, there ain't a lot of profit and potentially a considerable (there's a word here I can't think of for "tendency") potential to use substandard and really-cheap components to get the price down.

Well, at least they weren't anything important. Actually, if they were important pictures or video, I'd never have done anything on the media in the first place, I'd have copied them over to my hard drive first, before doing anything. So maybe I've gotten a cheap lesson, as if there was anything important, it's all stuff that I can either go back and take again or it probably is unimportant if I lost it.