M9 SD card lockdown signs and escape manouevre

[Richard G]

For anyone new to this camera there is the possibility of an early great disappointment. There are tell tale signs that it is not as bad as first feared.

For the second time my M9-P has completely locked up. The first time I think I interacted with the SD card from the Mac - copying an individual file or deleting one. Since the first lockdown I have assiduously formatted the card as the first thing after reinserting it, and I never do anything out of the camera but copy the files.

Last night after taking a few shots on the SanDisk 8G Extreme I noticed I could not review an image. I had been running the battery down deliberately and maybe that was a factor. Certainly I had recently formatted the card in camera, with the battery reasonably low. Perhaps that was a bad idea.

This morning with the battery fully charged I could take a shot occasionally and other times the camera would not fire when on. Neither the Menu button nor the Set button nor the ISO buttons did anything. When I had a shutter speed in the VF the shutter would fire and the self timer and the continuous functions worked fine.

The most interesting thing was that while sometimes I would have the calculated shutter speed in the viewfinder, at other times there was a series of three red LED squares. First one, then two, then three, and this would repeat. This read out possibility is of course not in the manual. Indeed, the manual only points to faults due to user error.

Anyway I now have a strategy of always having a system reboot available, namely an empty Leica formatted card. I have also found reformatting the card in a PC works. The Mac cannot even read the card in this situation, probably just as well.

I have searched on the web for the red squares, but only find red dots.....

 

[spikey]

I have never seen squares ... but dashes -, -- ,---
this has happened when the battery was low and the iso was high (800 or higher).
When I get an issue like this, I swap battery and SD card, and all is well and I can take pictures.
At home I charge the battery - and I find usually that on the swapped SD card there may be an image or 2 missing or unreadable.
With a properly charged Leica battery never a problem, but happens with my 3rd party one when it gets low.

 

[Fraser]

With all the issues with sandisk cards and the M9 why bother with them? (The cards that is not the M9🙂)

 

[Shade]

So the moral of the story is never let your battery be too low? Thank God I have not experienced any such troubles though..

 

[Richard G]

Today I have had this again with the battery well over 50%. I am going to retire that particular card. Apparently SanDisk cards are fine now and the only ones tested by Leica to be OK. Looking online there have been similar problems with other brands. This is very annoying. Interestingly there are no 2012 date threads that I can find on card problems with the M9. Maybe I have to be more particular when turning the camera on that it is exactly to S and not part way to C. Pretty fiddly. Certainly this has sapped my confidence in the M9 considerably. If I take this particular card out of action and it happens again with a full charge I will send the camera back to be inspected. Better buy some film....

 

[I Love Film]

It's really not a big deal. I have some ancient cards that work well with my M9, a 32gb Transcend that is perfect, some Sandisks that are fine.

I have a few cards that acted weird or lost an image or two, so I try a reformat in camera. If they still are no good, I stop using them. I have found maybe 3 cards out of about 40 that are no good in the Leica.

Just don't use that card. SD cards are ridiculously cheap now, don't buy another Sandisk. The off brands are excellent.

I almost never have any SD card problems now. You make a mountain out of a molehill.

 

[Fraser]

I think if the camera is still under warranty send it to Leica it shouldn't be that fiddly, I would also suggest using a program like Photomechanic to ingest pictures onto the computer rather than just dragging and copying off the card, maybe you already do that if you do ignore that🙂
I've always avoided the newer Sandisk cards and used Lexar or transcend.
Good luck with your camera and fingers crossed.

 

[Richard G]

Thanks for the reassurance. The issue is simply one of lost images. The Lexar software couldn't find anything on the card. I am going to reformat it in the PC I have and then try to recover them. I'll switch to Lexar cards.

 

[Richard G]

It's really not a big deal. I have some ancient cards that work well with my M9, a 32gb Transcend that is perfect, some Sandisks that are fine.

I have a few cards that acted weird or lost an image or two, so I try a reformat in camera. If they still are no good, I stop using them. I have found maybe 3 cards out of about 40 that are no good in the Leica.

Just don't use that card. SD cards are ridiculously cheap now, don't buy another Sandisk. The off brands are excellent.

I almost never have any SD card problems now. You make a mountain out of a molehill.

A MOUNTAIN OUT OF A MOLEHILL!!!!??? Are you crazy? The point is you can discover this problem way into some shoot, like my son's basketball game yesterday, where the camera locks down and is unusable. Without another card you cannot take more pictures. The camera locks down and you cannot even refromat, which i would have done as no software I've found can recover the images once this happens. Does everyone leave the house with a spare card? You sound like the types who dismissed this whole problem altogether. In six weeks I have lost more images with this M9 than I lost in the previous 40 years shooting film, 'I love Film'. Anyway maybe you don't need another card or even the first card because shooting an M9 can be like shooting an M2 with no film. I switched to Lexar. I'll try to find a Trend card. If this happens once more I'll be ditching the M9 for a full refund. The software in the M9 is a joke.

 

[Richard G]

I have found quite a lot of reports of this shutdown and loss of images still in 2012 after the last firmware upgrade. Lexar cards are not immune. Posters quote correspondence from Leica suggesting that they use older slower cards. M9 owners are going the way of Kodak film lovers, needing always to be in search of legacy cards.....They also advise not to let the battery get too low. Oh, and avoid continuous mode or bracketing, seems to be important. Nice camera the M9, but it is not finished yet. Or maybe it is. Hopefully this can be rescued by firmware but I suspect not.

 

[kzphoto]

Is Leica designing the electronics in these things? Seems like they would be better off working with a company with more experience if these issues continue.

 

[Richard G]

The odd thing is how many M9s have had no problems. It is impossible to know whether the SanDisk brand has anything to do with this at all. SanDisk might just have been what most users were using. Switching to a slower card rather than a different brand has some logic to it. Maybe if I get a replacement for this camera it would work fine, like the many cameras which have given no trouble after thousands of shots with all types of cards in all sorts of conditions. It certainly has me rattled. My wife, who approved the purchase, is deeply unimpressed. She still has no good shots of her son playing basketball. I'll try again next week and change the card after 20 shots. Ridiculous.

 

[Fraser]

If it keeps happening why not send it back to leica.

 

[Richard G]

Yes, I'll have to do that. But I don't think they know exactly what this is. Hopefully there is something specifically wrong with my particular camera if this happens again. Thanks Fraser.

 

[Richard G]

RECOVERY OF IMAGES!! By ersasing in DiskUtility (Mac) and formatting in FAT32 and then SanDisk RescuePro Deluxe.

Fortunately the Card Reader with the damaged SanDisk Extreme 8G showed up in DiskUtility on the Mac, with a Leica M9 icon. On the PC it repeatedly caused the MyComputer program to crash 'not responding'.

After trying several programs to retrieve the images, SanDisk's own program and one other were the only ones able to do a scan, and found 0 files and thousands or read errors. SanDisk Rescue Pro Deluxe could not see the Leica M9 icon and concluded that O's may have been written to the card in which case the situation was unrescuable.

Having been unable to reformat the card in the PC, I erased it with a FAT32 format in the Mac using DiskUtility. This then made the M9 visible to Rescue Pro Deluxe which recovered all the files. Only the last three were blank.

Aperture could not see these files, but Lightroom could and all have been imported. They seem completely uncorrupted. I have edited some. Lightroom did seem to run slower than ever but I did have a few programs open.

 

[Richard G]

Update: Months later with two Lexar Platinum II 8GB cards I have had no problems. I have not used C mode at all.

Today I left the house, not realizing that I had no SD card in. Knew I should not have put the baseplate back on the camera last night. I didn't want to pay the high street (literally Hight Street where I am) for a new 8G Platinum II. I would have bought a 4G but they only had that in Lexar in the 32x/Class 4 version. I bought that. Ken Rockwell has done tests for write speeds and found little difference in class 4 and class 10 cards. On some threads here discussing the SanDisk 8G Extreme problems, many recommended going back to older slower cards.

I'll post again if I have any problems. I have tried a number of continuous bursts of 4-5 images with no problem, and not any slower than with the Platinum II.

 

[jaapv]

Panasonic Gold cards appear to be problem-free as they have a system to protect the data on there card and will actually repair a damaged file structure (which is the root cause of he problems)

 

[Richard G]

With 1.196 aren't any and all card issues in the past?

Don't know. Maybe. I haven't upgraded as Discreet mode doesn't work with that firmware apparently. It is 3 months later and no fix for that. Odd behaviour of Leica when a new M9 variant is introduced at the same time as their current firmware doesn't allow the camera to be used according to the design and in line with the manual. I wonder what the problem is.

 

[V-12]

I wonder what the problem is.

There isn't such a general problem with the new Firmware, just a conspiracy to invent universal problems out of individual problems.

 

[wintoid]

Panasonic Gold cards appear to be problem-free as they have a system to protect the data on there card and will actually repair a damaged file structure (which is the root cause of he problems)

Bizarrely, when I got my M9P with the latest firmware in September 2012, I bought Panasonic Gold cards, and I had lockups. After a few such occurrences, I switched to a Sandisk Extreme 8Gb I had kicking around (exactly the card which I was trying to avoid due to reports on the internet), and since then I have had no lockups!