Navonics Gold on SD card - can a Lowrance kill an SD card?

[9D280]

OK, ref. my other thread, I thought this deserved a new title.

So, I buy the Gold charts, which of course come on an SD with Navonics logos all over it.

It was late. The kids had been playing up all evening, brain was toast, and at midnight or so I finally crept out to the garage, and put the card In the Lowrance in the hope it might work. (520C - yeah, the one that will read 2G SD cards..... )

Well, a couple of mins of thinking later, the Lowrance powers itself down. No error messages about not being able to read the card or having no charts or any of what I thought it might do, just simply powered down.

So I thought I'll try this In the PC and see what the story (i.e how big) this is. "disc unformatted - do you want to format drive J?" Noooooooooo! (removes card!)



Now, I know on older PCs you could kill flash drives by not "cleanly" removing them. Does anyone know if a Lowrance 520C would have the same effect if It tried to access a >2G card, which I assume it was trying to do, but couldn't?


And if so, any Lowrance dealers out there know if this is covered by anything and can I grovel nicely and get the thing re- flashed onto a 2G card (or two)?


Right now I don't have a good feeling about this.....

[Vandad]

I had similar issue with a navionics gold chart and went back to where I got it and managed to get a replacement. Next time I bought it via their webpage and still allowed me to back it up (the same SD card) after I copied photos on the SD card and then deleted the wrong file...

[9D280]

Vandad,

Thanks for confirming that I think I may for once actually be suffering from "old Tech" rather than rolling with it.

[jyasaki]

Originally Posted by 9D280

Now, I know on older PCs you could kill flash drives by not "cleanly" removing them. Does anyone know if a Lowrance 520C would have the same effect if It tried to access a >2G card, which I assume it was trying to do, but couldn't?

The situation you refer to only happens when there are unsaved writes when the disk/jumpdrive/card is removed. The changes are not reflected in the file table, and that's what screws up the device (MS Office is really bad for this.) Your Lowrance should not have been trying to write to the SD card (I assume), so that's likely not the problem.

FWIW, I have accidentally killed power to my Lowrance units quite often (as have others - usually leaning on the power distribution switches) and had no ill effects.

Navionics have always done weird copy protection things - I'd try it again in the Lowrance and see if it still works. If not then a plea to the retailer or Navionics would be in order.

jky

[Pikey Dave]

A PC won't recognise a Navionics card unless you use the proper Navionics card reader which acts as a dongle. You're probably OK


Sh1t happens