[Scott Dorsey]

In article ,
Annie C. Gilbert wrote:
Hi there!

I have been using using 2 Marantz PMD670 for a while now, with a bunch of d=
ifferent CF cards (4Gb, 1Gb, 512Mb). All was working fine until yesterday, =
when one machine just stopped letting me record, and instead is giving me t=
he "FULL_CARD" error message. Of note, when I feed the machine an empty car=
d, it does recognize the card as blank, but when I try to start a recording=
, it tells me that the card is full... The playback functions work alright,=
it recognizes and plays the samples I record on the other machine, but wil=
l not let me record new ones.

Remember the CF card has a comparatively small number of writes that you can
perform on it. When errors occur, it will redistribute data to new unused
blocks... but eventually you can get to a point where there are no spare
blocks available and writing stops.

If the problem really is the card (and you should verify that... buy another
industrial grade CF card and swap it out. You are using industrial grade cards
right?) then you can put the card into a reader on a computer and use
smartctl to see if smart has indicated internal errors. If so, throw it
out.

For now I don't know if this is related to this specific CF since I only ha=
ve the 4Gb available these days (the others are being used offsite). I tri=
ed re-formatting the card in different formats on the computer (FAT, FAT32,=
NTFS, exFAT), and reformatting using my other Marantz PMD670, but nothing =
worked...

Once you've reformatted it on the computer it's hard to tell what is going on.
But it does sound like it's the machine rather than the CF card, but you need
another CF card to be sure.

Note also that I tried reformatting the card using the non-recording machin=
e and it just keeps crashing (the display gets stuck on "EXECUTING 100%", n=
ever makes it to "done"). I tried letting it do its thing for a while, thi=
nking it might just be super slow, but it did not finish off even after 30 =
minutes (!!).

Any idea what else I could try?

Factory reset. There are two buttons you hold together on power on, I forget
which ones but it's in the service manual.

You can also make sure both machines have the same firmware rev.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."