Alas, no CHDK for me on my Sandisk 8GB A720...? - Hello, I'm a NEWBIE - HELP!! (Newbies assistance, User Guides and thank you notes) - CHDK Forum
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Alas, no CHDK for me on my Sandisk 8GB A720...?

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Offline simonlovejoy

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Alas, no CHDK for me on my Sandisk 8GB A720...?
« on: 28 / June / 2008, 08:03:46 »
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Hello folks, i've gone as far as possible with my new card reader, 8Gb Sandisk SDHC Card, and Canon A720, and i'm fresh out of luck, so i wanted to ask if anyone could help with where i'm going wrong.

I downloaded and ran CardTricks 1.34, selected my 8GB card, and hit Format as FAT32. Now i'd surmised from reading around on the site that i wouldn't have access to the Autorun feature with an SDHC card over 4GB in size, but i was planning on running CHDK each time i used the camera, so thought this should be okay. The Make Bootable option was thus unavailable, as i'd understood it would be due to the card being over 4GB in size (or FAT32 / 8GB, not FAT16?).

But when trying to copy the version of Allbest CHDK that i needed for my A720 onto the card using CardTricks, the CHDK-->Card feature was not accessible.

Looking around i found an article on getting CHDK onto the card without CardTricks, but it speaks of copying CHDK AND a firmware file onto the camera. Having already checked that my firmware was version GM1.00c, i'd thought this to be the correlating firmware version for the version of the Canon A720 CHDK .zip file that i had downloaded. I've copied the DISKBOOT.BIN file on to the SDHC card and replaced it in the camera, then turning the camera back on in Playback Mode. No dice.

I have read yet another article on autoboot mode using an 8GB card on the Forum, but i don't want to have to lose four whole gigabytes of storage if necessary just to run CHDK, and beyond that, i'm lost once more!

Without going into too much more detail, could someone suggest where i've gone wrong? Or am i just going to need to wait until someone writes a version of CHDK that supports larger FAT32 cards?

Thanks for any help that anyone could provide - i know i've probably made an elementary mistake or completely missed the point, but i do desperately want that RAW feature on my lil' snapper :)

« Last Edit: 28 / June / 2008, 08:05:34 by simonlovejoy »
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Offline BB

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Re: Alas, no CHDK for me on my Sandisk 8GB A720...?
« Reply #1 on: 28 / June / 2008, 10:45:43 »
Short answer is that the A720IS has the "Dry OS" as an operating system, and only supports the "bootable" version of loading CHDK... And part of those requirements is the card is formated to a maximum of 4GB with FAT16--it is a limitation of Dry OS.

There is no way (currently) of using the "Firmware Update" version of loading CHDK with Dry OS cameras.

You can read through this thread and see if you want to try the "Dual Partition" card configuration of creating a small FAT16 partition and a large 8GB FAT32 partition to use CHDK:

Autoboot with 8GB and HDHacker Possibillity

It is a bunch of work to make it work and may or may not work for you.

-Bill
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Offline simonlovejoy

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Re: Alas, no CHDK for me on my Sandisk 8GB A720...?
« Reply #2 on: 28 / June / 2008, 16:22:44 »
I had read through that article beforehand. Cheers for the info.

Bit of a b@sta@rd, really. Luckily i didn't buy the camera or the card based on the premise that i would be able to run CHDK on the A720 machine in the first place.

The FAT issue threw me at first but i had, stupidly, convinced myself that there would be a workaround. Based on the knowledge in aforementioned article, however, i haven't the time nor the know-how (having already iced one SDHC card on a previous occasion and on another completely different issue) to undertake the complex and as far as i'm concerned way-above-average process required necessary to get this thing working.

Cheers once more for the feedback. I will wait for an updated version, although by that time will undoubtedly have purchased my first D-SLR in lieu of hanging about for an update to this hack. <: )

Update:
Wow, it worked. Thank heavens for boring sunday afternoons  :)

After updating the card reader driver to the modified version so that it's seen as a fixed drive by XP i got the 8GB card partitioned with both a FAT16 16Mb and FAT32 7.75Gb partition, and CHDK seems to be running fine. The battery indicator suddenly shot from 95% to 0% and started warning me about low power as soon as i exited the CHDK Main Menu but swapping out my rechargeable batteries seems to have stopped this.

Pity you can't plug the camera in and rip your RAW files straight out of the Canon browser but i guess if XP won't do it, the camera isn't going to be much more compliant, so a card reader it is. I'm going to try modding the driver once i jam it into my work PC as well to see if i could carry the card reader around and get it read as a fixed drive at work as well. I'm assuming that if i swap my 8Gb out for a 4Gb there won't be any of the hassle with a reader, i should just be able to pop the card into the camera with a single partition and it would pick it up and save to the single partition as well. without having to set the card reader up as a fixed drive letter.

One thing that's a bit frustrating is that the .CRW files won't seem to read through Adobe Lightroom, the RAW digital camera plugin for Photoshop, or ACDSee Pro. I had to get a piece of kit called RawTherapee which is pretty nifty with a swell GUI and which opened the files first time. Had hoped to use Lightroom for previews and saving out to TIFF or JPEG but at least i can get my hands on the data now.

Thanks to all you folks at CHDK for some neat new stuff on the Canon!  :D
« Last Edit: 29 / June / 2008, 20:35:03 by simonlovejoy »
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