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Help, New 16Gb card won't work with CHDK Canon A650 IS!

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Offline voxmagna

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Help, New 16Gb card won't work with CHDK Canon A650 IS!
« on: 31 / July / 2014, 17:34:09 »
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My used Canon A650 IS came with a Sandisk Ultra II 2Gb card. Now I am shooting RAW with CHDK I thought I would buy a 16GB card, as RAW is so useful to recover those camera processed JPEGs with highlight burnout.

The 2Gb SanDisk Ultra II card can be 'locked' and the camera doesn't see it, CHDK works great.

However, when I go through the initialization of the new 16Gb SanDisk Ultra 30Mb/s card, no probs with the 'new' firmware 1.1.0.0 (chdk) loaded and the camera shows the CHDK menus just fine. :)

But when I lock the 16gb card to protect the CHDK boot file to power it up as normal, the camera comes back and says Card Locked!

Experts please help as I do want to carry on shooting RAW. Does CHDK firmware mask the card lock status bits at a particular card memory location, is it now in a different place on my new 16Gb card or is there something stupid I have forgotten? :(
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Offline zeno

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Re: Help, New 16Gb card won't work with CHDK Canon A650 IS!
« Reply #1 on: 31 / July / 2014, 18:18:53 »
The A650 is an old camera and cannot autoboot CHDK from a FAT32 card, only from FAT16. Since the maximum FAT16 partition is 4GB, you have to create two partitions on the card - a small FAT16 containing DISKBOOT.BIN to boot CHDK and the remaining space as FAT32 for scripts and photos. The firmware update method works with FAT32, but of course you have to do it every time you switch the camera on.

You can use my STICK app to do all the work of installing, but if you are a Windows user be warned that every time you want to transfer photos you will have to switch partitions. My WASP app will do the job.

For STICK see http://www.zenoshrdlu.com/stick/stick.html

For WASP see http://www.zenoshrdlu.com/wasp/wasp.html
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A570, S100, Ixus 127
Author of ASSIST, STICK, WASP, ACID, SDMInst, LICKS, WICKS, MacBoot, UBDB, CFGEdit
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Offline voxmagna

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Re: Help, New 16Gb card won't work with CHDK Canon A650 IS!
« Reply #2 on: 31 / July / 2014, 18:45:29 »
Thanks I was starting to think I would be into dual card format with 2 issues. 1. Will windows XP see my photos on the second FAT32 partition so  can transfer photos and 2. at the moment I have a 16Gb card formatted with a 10Mhb FAT16 partition which autoboots CHDK, but the camera does not see the remaining 15.9 Gb of space. and XP does not see the second partition.

This all looks a bit complicated but I will follow your links.
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Offline voxmagna

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Re: Help, New 16Gb card won't work with CHDK Canon A650 IS!
« Reply #3 on: 31 / July / 2014, 19:17:30 »
O.K I've followed the links but they have not got me any further. I had already built 2 partitions using windoze utilities - 1 FAT16 at 10 Mb and 2 a FAT 32 at 15.9 Gb. All the CHDK files I had previously downloaded and had working on the 4Gb card were transferred to the FAT16 partition.

The card can be locked and the camera will autoboot CHDK but puts up a low memory error because it is only seeing the small FAT16 partition. From what I can see, I have to use a CHDK script in the menu under Miscellaneous/SD card to swap partitions. My camera screen shows (1/0) but the select button does nothing.

Am I to conclude therefore that CHDK will not work with a 16Gb card in this camera? Or am I missing something?

What I want to achieve is to switch my camera on, have the RAW and zebra functions enabled and take pictures.  Does dual partitioning mean I will have to start selecting partitions or functions each time I switch on this camera?

Still struggling, but thanks.
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Offline waterwingz

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Re: Help, New 16Gb card won't work with CHDK Canon A650 IS!
« Reply #4 on: 31 / July / 2014, 19:19:27 »
Quote from: voxmagna on 31 / July / 2014, 18:45:29
1. Will windows XP see my photos on the second FAT32 partition so  can transfer photos
Windows (any version) only recognizes one partition on an SD memory card.  You need to make the FAT32 partition the primary partition when you want to read it from Windows - either with the menu entry in the CHDK menus that does that or with a Windows utility like WICKS.   When you are done you need to switch back so that the smaller FAT16 partition is primary.

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2. at the moment I have a 16Gb card formatted with a 10Mhb FAT16 partition which autoboots CHDK, but the camera does not see the remaining 15.9 Gb of space. and XP does not see the second partition.
XP will not (see above) but the camera will provided the 15.9G is actually formatted as a second partition.
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Ported :   A1200    SD940   G10    Powershot N    G16
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Offline waterwingz

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Re: Help, New 16Gb card won't work with CHDK Canon A650 IS!
« Reply #5 on: 31 / July / 2014, 19:24:35 »
Quote from: voxmagna on 31 / July / 2014, 19:17:30
O.K I've followed the links but they have not got me any further. I had already built 2 partitions using windoze utilities - 1 FAT16 at 10 Mb and 2 a FAT 32 at 15.9 Gb.
Sounds like you followed the links but did not actually use the STICK utility.  Not good.

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All the CHDK files I had previously downloaded and had working on the 4Gb card were transferred to the FAT16 partition.
Well, that's part of your problem.  All those CHDK files need to be on the larger FAT32 partition.  The only files needed on the FAT16 partition are diskboot.bin and ps.fi2.

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The card can be locked and the camera will autoboot CHDK but puts up a low memory error because it is only seeing the small FAT16 partition. From what I can see, I have to use a CHDK script in the menu under Miscellaneous/SD card to swap partitions. My camera screen shows (1/0) but the select button does nothing.
The partition swapping happens automatically at boot by CHDK - there is nothing you need to do for that to happen.  Provided your card is formatted properly that is.

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Am I to conclude therefore that CHDK will not work with a 16Gb card in this camera? Or am I missing something?
The code for dual paritition support is definitely in the CHDK build for the A650.

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What I want to achieve is to switch my camera on, have the RAW and zebra functions enabled and take pictures.  Does dual partitioning mean I will have to start selecting partitions or functions each time I switch on this camera?
Nope - you only need to worry about partition swapping when you want to put the SD card in your PC.  The rest of the time it will be totally invisible to you.
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Ported :   A1200    SD940   G10    Powershot N    G16
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Offline voxmagna

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Re: Help, New 16Gb card won't work with CHDK Canon A650 IS!
« Reply #6 on: 03 / August / 2014, 12:40:39 »
I used the 'Stick' followed the instruction and even got a log file that said the card was prepared and ready to go. Well it went in the camera and definitely wasn't ready. Tried the 'wasp' and that didn't make sense of the card.

So, I learned about all this and set about manual card preparation using 'Mini Tool Partition Wizard - brilliant Windoze tool by the way. In this manual process and getting CHDK to boot I discovered a few things.  Best to start with a 25 Mb  FAT 16 partition, leaving the rest of the 16 Gb card empty. Then you can try the camera out and get it to boot CHDK, instead of the 'Card Locked' message from the internal OS. Then you take a photo to create the Cannon folder structure. Go back to Mini Partition and create the FAT32 partition from remaining space and move the CHDK folder AND DCIM older into the new FAT 32 partition. Ah, but Windoze doesn't see the second partition! No sweat, just hack the Hitachi cfadisk.inf file with your reader hardware ID and your SD cards now look like hard drives with multiple partions showing for read and write. Issues with NOT (hot) swapping cards and mounting  to think about though.

From that and using the CHDK 'make card bootable' option I gort a 16Gb Sandisk Ultra card into multiple partitions and bootable. :)

With all the tools at hand I went back to have another look at Stick & Wasp. It appears that both utilities can appear to run and give satisfatory results when they are not. Mini partition Wizard showed me that only one FAT32 partition with CHDK files had been created, there was no FAT16 partition and remember I can now read both.

The built in  4 in 1 card reader is getting old now but I have a second USB card reader dongle which I tried. When Stick had finished I checked the card and this time it had prepared 2 partitions and put files on them. I closed the lock switch and it worked in the camera straight away. Conclusion so far is the card remove/insertion switching in this reader is suspect or intermittennt. Of course it's vital for both Stick & Wasp to move through their program stages.

In this thought provoking investigation I also put a 4Gb card in the camera ready to give up and use CHDK with 4Gb cards - the size limit for FAT16 and CHDK boot files MUST be on a FAT 16 partition. First I formatted it. Well what do you know, the Canon formatter formatted the card as FAT32 so CHDK would not boot. No probs, its just a matter of understanding that you need to set a cluster size of at least 64K in Mini tool Partition wizard and the whole 4Gb becomes FAT16 instead of just half the card.

Of course running Stick on a 4Gb FAT16 card means no double partition or Windoze reading hassle with Wasp. Using 4Gb max size cards with Stick is the neatest solution for anybody wanting to try CHDK on Digic III cameras.

My next concern is you are away somewhere with your dual partitioned photo card and needing access to photos for emailing or to copy for a friend. Well you might even walk into a photo shop for prints.

I can see 3 ways of dealing with this. 1. You have your camera usb lead and a fresh set of batteries to upload from the camera (I assume it will still do this?). 2. I've put copies of Stick and Wasp on the FAT16 partitions of my two 16Gb cards. 3. Find a computer not running Windoze (e.g Linux?)

I think if you want to shoot RAW saved to a single FAT32 partition, you go and buy another camera that will do it. But I am now happy I managed to get Stick and Wasp to work, although I did replace Sticks default CHDK folder with the latest stable version that included some modules I wanted. :)

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Offline waterwingz

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Re: Help, New 16Gb card won't work with CHDK Canon A650 IS!
« Reply #7 on: 03 / August / 2014, 14:08:53 »
Quote from: voxmagna on 03 / August / 2014, 12:40:39
I used the 'Stick' followed the instruction and even got a log file that said the card was prepared and ready to go. Well it went in the camera and definitely wasn't ready. Tried the 'wasp' and that didn't make sense of the card.
...

The built in  4 in 1 card reader is getting old now but I have a second USB card reader dongle which I tried. When Stick had finished I checked the card and this time it had prepared 2 partitions and put files on them. I closed the lock switch and it worked in the camera straight away. Conclusion so far is the card remove/insertion switching in this reader is suspect or intermittennt. Of course it's vital for both Stick & Wasp to move through their program stages.
tl;dr :  it turned out to be a hardware problem with your old SD card reader


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Of course running Stick on a 4Gb FAT16 card means no double partition or Windoze reading hassle with Wasp. Using 4Gb max size cards with Stick is the neatest solution for anybody wanting to try CHDK on Digic III cameras.
That's pretty much what I do with my pre-2011 cameras.  You can get a lot of pix on a 4G card and extra cards are not very expensive.

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My next concern is you are away somewhere with your dual partitioned photo card and needing access to photos for emailing or to copy for a friend. Well you might even walk into a photo shop for prints.
There is a menu option in the Miscellaneous -> SD Card menu for that :  Swap partitions [ 1/1 ]
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Ported :   A1200    SD940   G10    Powershot N    G16
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Offline voxmagna

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Re: Help, New 16Gb card won't work with CHDK Canon A650 IS!
« Reply #8 on: 04 / August / 2014, 05:31:15 »
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There is a menu option in the 'Miscellaneous' -> SD Card menu for that :  Swap partitions [ 1/1 ]

I found that already in Miscellaneus stuff - but mine stays stuck on (1/0) and doesn't do anything. The camera still boots into CHDK, which it wouldn't do if the partition had actually been switched.

I was thinking a bit more about this. Most will be shooting JPEGs and RAW.  I'm saving JPEG + DNG and the file sizes for 12Mpix super fine are about 7Mb and 15 Mb respectively.

I appreciate that CHDK is using the Canon hooks, but if the oem Canon file structure was kept on the FAT16 partition and RAW saved on the second FAT32 partition, the card would behave normally (with reduced storage space) for JPEGS without partition switching and being a nuisance in some print processing shop on holiday. For the A650IS,  partition sizes for about 640 pictures (no video) would come out at about 4.5Gb for JPEGS in FAT16, with RAW DNG using the rest of the 16Gb card as FAT32.
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Offline voxmagna

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Re: Help, New 16Gb card won't work with CHDK Canon A650 IS!
« Reply #9 on: 04 / August / 2014, 05:42:37 »
Correction, the FAT 16 partition can be no larger than 4Gb, i.e around 550 JPEGS - still a lot of pictures as you say.
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