I have a Zeiss Elta S20 that takes a PCMCIA card with SMI installed on it for robotic operation. The instrument stopped working in robotic mode last week. It will not boot the SMI program from the card, although the program is displayed. The onboard works fine but that does me no good as far as robotic operation goes.
Neither of my laptops will recognize the PCMCIA card but my HP200 palmtop will and I can view all of the files that are installed on it but I can't tell if something is buggered up or not. I took the PCMCIA card that is installed in the palmtop and plugged it in to the S20 and the instrument will run the DOS programs that are installed on it (CEFB and TPC). I am fairly certain there is no problem with the instrument itself.
The card does not have a battery, so it isn't that. Do you suppose there may be some type of utility that can make a diagnosis/repair?
Yep. My TDS Survey card went bad some time back. All electronic media has a lifetime of some period or other. Even archive quality storage media is advertised as only being good for 50 years or so.
Yup, can go bad, and many times you destroy a chip from static electricity, or fatigue. First thing to do is clean all of the contacts really well on both the card, and the device. If that doesn't do it, you are usually SOL.
Is it a "driver" issue?
Sooner or later, everything goes bad.
I seem to have been losing hard drives left and right.
One of my cousins is a computer geek and had built himself a flash memory based computer, rather than having a rotating hard drive waiting to go bad. It seemed like a great idea, until somewhere between 250,000 and 1,000,000 writes to the flash drive it locked up and would no longer access the segment of memory it was using for a read/write cache.
After doing some further research on the subject, he found that modern flash media does have a finite number of times it can be written to before it locks up. Most of us never exercise our thumb drives and other flash media to the point where we see hundreds of thousands of write messages to the drives.
Following that realization, he rebuilt the computer with a flash drive for the operating system, and a very small normal hard drive for the read/write cache the system uses.
Last ditch effort, you can try re-formating the PCMCIA card. If your lap top still has a PCMCIA card slot, or with an external PCMCIA card reader. When your PC recognizes the PCMCIA, it'll assign a Drive letter; high-light the (E:), , Right-mouse click format...
After re-formatting, copy the Robotic S/w back over to the PCMCIA, Stick it back in your Instrument, give her a try.
FYI, PCMCIA cards do not have internal batteries on board. They dervive their power from the device their inserted into, (PC, or Instrument). Cards that have their internal back up batt's were the Sram, etc.