Hi,

I bought the 5D when it first came out. At that same time I bought two 16GB CF cards.

A year or two later, I bought two 32GB CF cards.

Shortly thereafter, I bought a Sony FS-100 and the 5D became my secondary (very light use) camera.

Last week I used it as a b-cam during an interview and shot two 32GB (relatively newer) cards. One imported fine, the other freaked out, gave the spinning beachball, then refused to load. I plugged it into a different computer and after not initially loading, it loads up and I'm able to get the data off it, and now it loads fine each time I plug it in.

I flagged the card to further investigate, then shot some stills over the weekend on one of the 16GB cards.

It won't read at all ("Initialize, Ignore, Eject?"), and no amount of different computers or different card readers seems to help. Downloaded a few different recovery programs, no dice. Disk utility shows this 16GB card as a 32MB Card. Eventually tried to format it in camera, and the camera refuses to format it. Mac refuses to format it too.

Questions:

1) Anything that can be done to get the still images off this card?

2) What is causing the problem here? Bad camera? Bad card reader? Bad CF cards? My 5D is reaching end-of-life and I'd rather not be sinking more money into new CF cards, but I will if I have to. I'd like to get a few more shoots out of it before I buy the Sony F7.

Interested to hear your speculation.