Compact Flash card problems.

[Guy_Richtoy]

OK, I'll start from the top with this one...

Recently did a full system rebuild and am now up and running with XP Pro SP3, all updated and going well.

Tried to connect my 1gb Kingston CF card through a MotionFlash card reader to take the best part of three hundred photos off it. Windows decided it didn't want to do it and told me 'The disk in drive G is not formatted' and 'Do I want to format it now'.

As you can image, my answer was NOOOOOOO. So I decided to unplug him and see if the card had decided to stop working in the two minutes between the camera and the PC. I plugged the same card into the same card reader and stuck it into the MacBook. No prizes for guessing... It worked straight off the bat.

I took this as a good opportunity to back up the pictures and whipped them onto the Mac, however, they are no good to me there as Lightroom and CS4 are on my PC...

So, I plugged the card back into the PC. Formatted him as Windows wanted and returned to the MacBook. Now the MacBook doesn't want to copy the pictures back onto the card (Get Info suggested that it is read only, but I'm not too clued up on Macs).

I decided to see if it would work in the camera so I stuck it back in and turned the old girl on. 'Card not initialized' was the response (FujiFilm's way of telling you it cant write to the card), so I formatted the little blighter in the camera.

Back at the Mac now and the photos happily copy back onto the card. Wander over to the PC and... Suprise, it gives me the same format message as before.

Now, this has really annoyed me somewhat as, when previously running XP Pro SP2, I NEVER had this problem and have an archive of photos the size of, well, something really big.

I have a host of different USB flash cards and have not once encountered this problem in the past. Does anybody have an idea as to what the problem is here? Is it SP3? Is there a setting I've missed when setting up after my re-install? Is my PC harbouring a dislike for flash media?

Any help, much appreciated. I'm starting to go mad.