7D repeated Card error- lost footage

[Cri Cri]

Hello,

I have the same issues with my 7D, using Kingston Ultimate CompactFlash 16GB 266X (approx 50MB/s).
When i bought the camera it came with firmware 1.2.5 and had the issues.
After upgrading to firmware 2.0.0, the issues remain.

I have identified actually 2 distinct problems:
1. Sometimes after stopping the movie recoding, the camera will take a few seconds to stop, the red activity led will blink but in the end the message Error 02: Card can not be accessed. Reinsert/change or format card with camera. is displayed and the clip lost. This is RANOM. For example, i shot a 50 seconds clip, stopped, recorded another 1 minute clip: error. Recorded another 50second, ok, another 30 seconds: error. Then recorded another 4 clips, the last one of 3 minutes and everything was ok. I let sometimes the camera record the maximum of 12 minutes and went ok. Before starting shooting, i formated the card from the camera. It seems to me that if i record a clip and delete it, next recording almost always resulted in an error. If i would take a still picture and then record, would work ok, but this is not certain.

2. Only once it happened on firmware 1.2.5 that after stopped the recording the camera froze completely so i had to remove the batteries. It seems that the FAT filesystem on the card was corrupted and had to run chkdsk. The result was that it recovered for me the first 250MB of that clip. Later on i found out that i should have used data recovery tools like GetDataBack or Parition recovery from DiskInternals to recover even more data. The idea is that the clip was there! (initially a 0 bytes file but after chkdsk a recovery file appeared).

So the main difference between 1. and 2. is that in 1. i DO NOT HAVE ANY FILES. It is hard to recover them afterwards especially if you overwrite the empty space by recording other movies.

Should this be because of buffering? I noted that the camera formats the card with 32KB cluster size. I want to try with smaller cluster sizes and see if there is a difference.

I browsed the internet for some answers and most of the ppl say “buy the pro cards, it’s the card’s fault not the camera”. I am not by far a pro, and do not afford to pay 3 times the price on a pro card.

Sorry for my english and long post.

[Sean Winn]

Hi Cristian,
All I can tell you is that after I switched to the Lexar high speed compact flash cards, I never had another issue with the 7D. Vincent Laforet is where I learned about this stuff: https://blog.vincentlaforet.com/mygear/media/

I use Lexar 16gb 600x compact flash cards. Not sure they make them any more, but now you can get an even better card for about half the cost I paid for mine: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/841564-REG/Lexar_LCF16GCTBNA1000_16GB_CompactFlash_Memory_Card.html

Hope that helps,
Sean

[Cri Cri]

Thanks for the reply Sean.

Lexar pro 600x is still available in my country but the price is exactly 3 times higher than the kingston, which is not an option for me since i am not a professional. Still I am not convincend that simply buying a faster card would fix the problem since several people reported that the cards that worked a lot of time perfectly on 5DMK2 had this issue on 7D.

I will try and borrow for a time a pro card and see if there are issues.

So far, i have formatted the cards (i have two of them) with 64K cluster size – the largest, and shooting around 15 clips (filling a 16GB card twice ~96 minutes of footage) triggered the error only once! I formatted the card fully, not through quick format.

I will test further and let you know.

[Sieger Duinkerken]

I’m experiencing the same problem with a SanDisk 16GB 32MB/s card, and it drives me crazy! I’ve lost precious video material several times. It happens unpredictedly.

Would there be any way to force Canon to help its customers? To me this sounds like a ‘known issue’. Unfortunately the warranty period of my 7D is over, and this Card Error happens so randomly, it probably would be hard to prove something is wrong with this camera.. I doubt that this is a repairable issue.