Inert Ramblings

Quite a few months ago my Father gave me a pile of large SmartMedia cards that stopped working in his Olympus digital camera. After a few months of use, each card slowly started reporting CARD ERROR on the camera LCD. I was able to use the cards in various other devices, but they never worked again in Olympus digital cameras.

This weekend while visiting friends in Maryland, I was presented with the same conundrum: yet more SmartMedia cards that had become corrupted and made effectively useless in Olympus digital cameras. After doing some research, I finally ran across Sally and Steve’s SmartMedia Repair Guide. All the information presented on their page is available by scouring various other resources, but it was the first page I ran across that made the modified SMPrep (smprep.exe) binaries available:

• smprep1.exe

• smprep2.exe

The basic gist is that some PC card readers can erase the Olympus low-level header, and running smprep1.exe intentionally breaks the low-level formatting of the card so smprep2.exe is forced to restore the Olympus low-level formatting and Panoramic mode.

The process is time consuming, but has successfully repaired all of the corrupted SmartMedia cards! Looks like I’ll be mailing a pile of SmartMedia cards back to my friend in Maryland!