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Sam654Flag for Australia

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Formatting my 4GB SD Card that is currently RAW

I have a camera with a 4GB SD card.

My Windows 7 64Bit computer can not read the card in it's current state. In disk manager it offers me only the options to format it.

My Windows XP 32Bit Laptop reads it no problem!

Why is this?

What should I format it to?
NTFS
FAT
FAT32
exFAT
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dbrunton
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>>  Why is this?

Quite possibly the card is incompatible with the reader with the Windows 7 64 bit computer.

If it is being read by the XP system and you can write/read data on it there with no problems then that system is OK.

Now some readers have problems with large capacity SD cards.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital#Storage_capacity_and_incompatibilities for examples.  You may well have a reader with this problem.
Back up the data and try formatting with NTFS in the windows 7 computer and see the status
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Why NTFS over the others?
Check how your camera uses the SD card IF you are going to format it.

Most likely it is FAT32.

Use Windows Explorer to look at the card.  Right click on Properties and see what it says the file format is.
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In Disk Manager it says the it's of type RAW.
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nobus
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check on camera website
it will be clearly mentioned what format is compatible
shahzoor - why repeat what was posted?  not very friendly - and it does not add to the answers
>>  In Disk Manager it says the it's of type RAW.

That is on your Windows 7 box.  And using Disk Manager.  Disk Manager will report RAW if it doesn't know what it is or understand what it is.

Use your XP box and Windows Explorer.
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Nobus - The Camera is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ10.

dbrunton - Yes you're right, in Windows 7 it says RAW. Just checked in Windows XP it says FAT32. I'm a bit more confused now as to why the Windows 7 computer can't read it if it's FAT32 already.

I really need it to work in both computers. I would have been tempted to format it using FAT32 on the XP PC as I would have thought the W7 PC would be backwards compatible.

File format and SD Card info here not too helpful.
http://www.dpreview.com/news/2010/1/26/panazs7

This quote from Photography Blog is confusing
"Sadly there's no support for the RAW file format, which would really have been the icing on the cake for serious photographers looking for a backup-pocket camera to their DSLR."
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I formatted a spare 2GB SD Card in the XP PC using FAT32. It worked in both computers.
I then formatted a spare 16GB SD Card in the XP PC using FAT32. It worked in both computers.
They also both read the correct SD Card size 1.xGB formatted and 14.8GB formatted.

These two spare SD Cards are Class 2.
The problem 4GB SD Card is Class 10. Could this be a problem?
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Didn't make sense in the end, so I just formatted the card as FAT32 using the XP PC and for some strange reason it works in everything now! Maybe just a soft fault on the card that was fixed by formatting.
Thanks for your help.
Interesting.  The Class rating refers to speed transfer.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital#Speed_Class_Rating

Anyway glad it is working now.
in many cases, you can format the card in the Camera
if you want to know - put it in a pc to see what type it formatted in