Canon XT: Error 99 on CF drive

[Ashton]

My Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT (8MP) Is refusing to accept my 8gb CF Drive. When I pop the drive in and turn on the camera it says "CF ERROR" if I go into setup and try to format the drive it says "Error 99"

However, When I put in my 1gb CF Card, it shoots, reads, formats, etc fine.

CF Drive is tested good, works fine in my PC and scandisk reports no mad sectors.

Any suggestions? I'd really like to get the CF Drive to work since it's so much faster (and is 8gb vs 1gb)

 

[fugu]

Have you used the card in the camera before? If not, have you tried formatting it in your PC?

 

[Ashton]

Nope, never used the drive in the camera before. Had it lieing around for ages (bought it for my old PDA I finally sold last year), it got thrown in a drawer and as I was cleaning out and found it, since my new camera takes CF I thought the drive might work... no dice...

Tried formatting it, formatted fine, but put it in the camera same "CF ERROR" and "ERROR 99"

 

[SilverMK3]

Didn't microdrives draw more power than the CF Type II spec allowed, back in the day?

 

[darktiger]

I use to get that error. Try this, take your lens off, and rub a eraser on the contacts of the lens and the contact points on the camera.

 

[Ashton]

I use to get that error. Try this, take your lens off, and rub a eraser on the contacts of the lens and the contact points on the camera.

It has to do with the CF Drive, as long as I leave the CF Card in, it works beautifully. From what I've read "error 99" is roughly equivalent to "general hardware error" I will keep that in mind though for future reference, thanks ^_^

Didn't microdrives draw more power than the CF Type II spec allowed, back in the day?

They draw a lot more than CF Cards do (in part due to the fact they are mechanical and also often stay "active" (spinning) the whole time the camera is on. (On the other hand, though, they're faster than many low-end cards while being cheeper than many high-capacity cards in the same speed range --- arguably the magnetic media also has more write cycles but with the cost of CF memory today this is negligible)

After doing more research, I'm seeing a lot of compatibility issues with the XT and microdrives. I also wonder if this may be the same problem my PDA had: Unable to use a drive in True-IDE mode (uses CF physical interface but IDE standards for R/W/S)

 

[stop!theradio]

I just used my old microdrive for the first time on my XT on wednesday for a birthday party - worked fine. I got an error initially, so I just formatted the microdrive and it worked perfectly the whole night.