pentax 330gs

CF invalid what does this mean

Have you tried formatting the card in the camera?

Hi

We have an old Pentax Optio 33L. Plan was to bring it out of retirement for a child. Bought a new Compact Flash card. Works in a reader, but not in the Pentax camera. No bent pins in camera, but camera comes up with 'CF Invalid' error and in camera format option in menu does not format card.

My question is what format should a CF be? If I knew this I could format it on a PC. Or is there just a backward compatibility with he modern CF cards?

Card is 16Gb/5Mb.s ScanDisk Ultra.

Testament to the product it still runs great - but without memory its game over and it would be such a shame.

Any workaround help ideas appreciated.

Jay

The 16GB card might well be an SDHC, which won't work.

You need a plain SD card, so maybe something around 4GB would be suitable.

For the record the camera takes Compact flash cards and the Optio 33L, dating from 2003, was originally supplied with a 16Gb CF Card. (Putting any SD card in wouldn't be a good idea without a suitable adaptor!)

I presume you haven't got the original card supplied as that would be the best bet? Some things worked with one card and wouldn't with another! It could be your Ultra Sandisk is too new to be recognised by the camera or has simply gone bad, Can you read and write to it on a PC? if not it might suggest it has gone bad.
I suspect the format would have been FAT 16 but there is no guarantee that will help if the camera doesn't recognise the card.

Is the 16 GB card actually 16 MB. CF using cameras from around then were limited in the size of card they could use, for example I acquired a couple of years ago a Minolta Dimage 7i which would not accept any CF card larger than 2 GB ...and the smallest card I could buy at that time(two years ago) was 4GB. If you remember the ist D had to have a firmware upgrade to be able to take bigger cards.