Canon A590 with Transcend16GB SDHC card
This is what i found worked for me - before I saw the post about Lexars' USB formatting tool (Doh!), which is probably easier but since I already learned this stuff I thought I'd share anyway.
I played with this most of the day got everything working; WinXP Pro SP2 only sees the image files (jpg & crw), my Canon A590 autoloads CHDK but shows all the card's free space.
This is just a verification and maybe a little clarification of Wind's post Reply #122 on: 24 / September / 2008.
I've used computers for a long time but certainly am NOT a disk expert, but this made sense to me, so...
I used the StereoData Maker "sdminste.exe" to create 2 partitions and let it go ahead and install the Stereo version of CHDK.
Using Beeblebrox, (see Wind's post, aove) I found the flash card (Disk #3 in my case) by looking at all the Disk #s shown and matching the number with the one that shows a total size close to my card. That's pretty easy - Disk 0 showed 305,245MB (that's not it!), Disk 1 showed 114,498MB(nope) Disk 2 showed 95,393MB & Disk 3 showed 15,319MB (that's it).
Once found Disk #3 = SD card, BeetleBrox showed 2 partitions, 4096 sectors & 31384574 sectors. I changing partition 1 from type 01 to type 00, which hides it from WinXP & from the camera. When Parititon 1 is set as type 01, that's the only partition WinXP sees, so I set it to 01 and copied the DISKBOOT.BIN from the a590-101b-0.9.7-719-full.zip (that has the stuff I want) and pasted it into the 2MB, overwriting the Stereodata version of DISKBOOT.BIN
I then used CardTricks to make that partition bootable. Then used BeetleBrox again to change the type back to 00. I haven't mentioned every time I had to remove & reinsert the SD card but basically it's anytime you change the partition Type, so that Windows can see the change.
Changing my SD card's 1st partition back to Type 00, WinXP ignores it and all you see is the big-bunch-of-pictures partition. You only need to play with the partition type again if you want to change things in the Camera's boot partition - such as updating the CHDK DISKBOOT.BIN file.
From Wind's post
Well, this is better solution working under WinXP (do not know if it is also OK under Win Vista):
- you can any time change that code (see below) from 01 to 00 and back. Principle is, that Win XP ignore 00 code but CANON will see it. So: in CANON it download CHDK and change to second partition, in Windows (using card reader) it ignores first partition and goes to second=big one, where all data is
7. Run Beeblebrox NT. Choose your drive from the drop-down (CAREFULL!! otherwise bye bye your hard disk data). Since Beeblebrox NT starts numbering from 0 the number of your drive should be the one you found with aefdisk32 minus 1, which is 4 in my case. Change the type of the first partition on this drive to 00 (from 01, probabbly) and save the changes. Then close Beeblebrox NT.
8. Take the card off your card reader, put it back.
9. Windows now will see your second partition and show the first as unallocated space.)