my 6gb hitachi microdrive died -- any ideas?

[moonlonely]

I've been using it for a month or two, and it's worked excellently. I've mostly used it to store large movies, and a lot of music.

Today, I had it in a card reader, and I was copying some movies. When I took it out of the card reader and popped it in my x50v, it wasn't recognized at all. I didn't get one of those pesky, would you like to format it questions. Instead, my axim just responded very slowly for a few moments, and once that stopped, I couldn't find my CF card slot.

I removed the microdrive and put it back in my card reader. The computer stopped recognizing the card reader. I removed the card, unplugged the reader, plugged it back in, and it recognized other cards. I put the microdrive in. It stopped recognizing the card reader. Repeated the experiment with another card reader. Same results.

My only guess as to why it may have died is that I didn't check to make sure the data was done copying from my computer to the microdrive. But about 10 minutes ago, it had said 4 minutes left, so I didn't think twice about just pulling it out.

That said, there's no way to reformat it, or even recognize it. Anybody have any ideas besides returning it to Hitachi? It is under warranty, so that is an option. *sigh*

[rlarson_mn]

That is the danger of a micro drive. You need to make sure its completed its task prior to disconnecting it from the connection. I would suggest you talk to Hitachi about the warranty question. It is also possible that it just stopped working before you removed it from the card reader.

[Xcilion]

If you took it out of your cardreader before it was finished writing the data, this can damage your MD.

[moonlonely]

Well, hopefully the warranty covers it, and I never make that mistake again. If not, I guess I'm back to using a boring 1Gb CF card until flash memory prices drop some more.

*sigh*

Thanks for the confirmation. (I'm still kinda hoping that it's not my fault, but it doesn't really make a difference)