when your sd card won’t format

I wanted to reclaim my Kingston 4GB SD card that had two partitions on it (70MB and 3.6GB), for use as a boot disc for my Raspberry Pi, but using the built-in partition manager (Disk Management) in Windows 7 and the SDFormatter that rPi.org recommends only enabled me to format or delete the smaller of the two partitions.

UPDATE: SDFormatter was version 4.0, and is actually the tool distributed by the SD Card Association. Official, but useless for this task.

I still don’t know why this was the case, and since I’ve now found a fix I don’t really care enough to figure out what the issue was (especially considering my searching for an answer brought me to many other people with the same problem, and not always reasons or reproducible results).

Frustrated with the lack of ability to completely wipe the card, I remembered the way I most commonly format SD cards — my camera. I had no idea if the internal “format” option would wipe all partitions on the card, but I figured it was a good hunch.

When I popped the card into the camera, it only showed space available for three photos — which tells me it was reading the 70MB partition. After formatting the card via the camera’s internal menus, the entire 4GB was available for photos.

I put the card back in my computer and confirmed that yes, there was now only one partition on the card, and it was alloted the entire space on the card.

So, a quick fix for the SD card partition problem: use your camera to format the card.

Apparently this is my answer to every SD card problem…

[FWIW, it was a Pentax K-x DSLR.]

meeting the city

If there is one thing that characterizes my travels, it is wandering. Exploring. Finding the nooks and crannies of new and old cities. Including my own.

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I love glancing — and walking — down back alleys to see what’s there, climbing hills and objects to get another view, and — when I have my camera in hand — being a tourist wherever I am.

I love the beauty of nature and of urban portraits.

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I love the familiar and lifeless made personal. The transformation from forgettable background to memories. From downtown back alley to “the back alley with numbers written on the metal door that’s sunken into the wall. There was a piece of ice hanging onto its anchor for dear life, dancing around in the wind, right over there.”

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illumination | photo challenge

Old NO. 7 (illumination)

I wanted to start the photo challenge again, and thought bottles of liquor would work well with the theme of “illumination”, giving a chance (and challenge) to work with the various shapes and colours that are out there.

I went with Bombay Sapphire and Jack Daniels, as the gin bottle is a lovely blue with clear liquid, and the whiskey bottle has such a distinctly recognizable shape.

Steve let me use a few of his softboxes for the shoot, along with one of his speedlights. My main focus was the Bombay Sapphire bottle, as it nearly glows when you use the light properly. The Jack was a bit of a disappointment, as the bottle and liquid are both dark, so try as I might, the light would just get sucked up with nothing but glare to show for it.

This shot was the surprise of the night, though — cropping a shot of the entire bottle just above the shoulder, as I really liked the colour of the whiskey in the neck (this is what I had been hoping for with the whole bottle, and might still go for by removing the label), as well as the look of their trademark “No. 7”.

The original shot also works well when cropped just above the main label, as it’s more recognizable as a bottle of whiskey (and still a compelling photo), so I might put that up later for comparison.