Topic: RE: Edirol R-09HR SD card problems...

[citizenarcane1970]

Hi there.. I've had the Edirol R-09HR for a few months now and absolutely love it and have had no problems with it until now.I'll post my reviews/experiences in another post..I use it for mainly recording my gigs, rehearsals and other big concerts. So far I've recorded only a handful of shows. I'm using external mics for the concerts and use the internal mics for rehearsals. I've got the settings at MP3/320kbps-48.0kHz.. I'm still using the SD card that came with it.

So last week I was recording my Friday night gig which I've been doing for the last month and half which is three 45min sets. And I always use batteries to the power the Edirol. Anyway I had some batteries that didn't have a lot of juice left and while recording the first hour and a half the batteries died in the middle of a song and the Edirol shut down. Anyway I got home that night and wanted to download what was recorded onto my laptop as I usually do. So I plugged the Edirol into the laptop, proceeded to download and about 3 songs/mp3's into it, the downloading suddenly stopped and then I got a pop up window on my computer that said I tried to disconnect the unit incorrectly which I certainly didn't. And I don't recall accidently moving/hitting the unit or pulling on the cable while it was downloading.. Anyway I just figured I'd try again.. so I powered the unit down, unplugged it, and then plugged back in, turned the Edirol on and I get nothing. The little Edirol icon does not show up on my desktop. I tried this several times with no luck. I then tried shutting down and this time removing the SD card and putting it back in. This time I got a pop up window that said something like "Disk Insertion" Invalid disk doesn't recognize this disk.. with buttons that say initialize/eject.. etc..

Anyway I've tried this several times now with the same results. The Edirol itself still functions fine as far as being able to record onto that same SD card... and the contents of the card are still there and playback fine. I just can't get the mp3's to my laptop. I also tried re-formatting the card but it didn't help.
So I'm wondering is this card now useless or can it be repaired..? Has anyone else had this problem before..? Any suggestion..?

Anyway if anyone could offer some advice I'd really appreciate it.... Thanks..

[jamroom]

I think the first thing you should do is to check the card in an external card reader. See if you can get the data off the card that way. I don't have any suggestions beyond that though - I'm no expert. You did say that you had tried to reformat the card though, which I would presume to have removed all your recorded data.

I'm surprised you are recording your own music in mp3. Is this because of the small size of bundled SD card? If so, you probably want to get a bigger card, you never know when you might need the space.

Unless someone can offer a reason why this has happened, then I would certainly buy another card to avoid a repeat. There are threads on here for R09 compatible cards.

[travelinbeat]

I'd be curious to know what kind of card this is (brand, etc).  Assuming it's an offbrand, you should consider investing in something like a Sandisk or PNY SD card.  Keep in mind that with these cards you are getting what you pay for.  Far better to pony-up the extra $20-$40 for a card that won't crap out on you and lose all your data.

Jamroom brings up a great point that a cardreader is also a very valuable investment.  You can pick one up for dirt cheap in any Best Buy.  Aside from allowing you to remove the hurdle of reading your data through a device (a process which can be cumbersome when working with certain devices), an external card reader will also allow you to pop out your card from your device read it without sucking up battery life.  These cardreaders are really handy and worth their weight in gold.

That having been said, if you are trying to recover that data which is unreachable from your SD card, I have had good success with a freeware restoration program (available here).  This program will let you select a drive (your card should be being recognised as a drive) and search through deleted and corrupted files.  Sometimes Windows gets tempermental about transfering even slightly corrupted data.  I had this happen with a show once and upon recovering the "untransferable" file with this Restoration utility, I was able to listen to it just fine, track it out, EQ it, .flac it, and share it without any problems whatsoever.

SO:  In recap, get a new SD card and pay for a good one-- get a card reader-- and get this restoration utility.

Best of luck