Happy Almost New Year...

Apologize in advance if this has been answered, rather than mine through all the threads, I figured I'd ask first in hopes of someone being kind of enough to assist me.

Anyway, i've been getting this "Card not formatted. Format this card with this camera" message quite frequently for the past 4-5 months. Basically I would insert a working CF card (that ive already shot footage off of) and the camera would not read it displaying the above error message.

I thought it was card specific AND/OR camera specific but it occurs on ALL my cameras. I have a 3 year old Canon 5D, and 1 year old 7D and 5D's. In addition, i've been using a ton of SanDisk Ultra 30MB/s 8GB cards, they worked perfectly for over a year until the last couple of months.

I actually thought this was card specific, until the message popped up again with my Kingston 133X 4Gb card. In addition, the same card would then not work on my card reader. Weird.

The only way I have combat this, was to either: turn the camera on and off multiple times, reinsert the card multiple times and/or switch out different cards until one worked. Then after random atttempts, the camera would read the card fine, no error message and all the previous footage was still on there.

So my question is why does this happen and how can I prevent it?

Thank you very much in advance, I appreciate any time and knowledge you can give in hopes of helping me on this issue :)

Did you format the card with each specific camera? After you load your footage into your editing system, instead of deleting it from the card in the computer, put the card back into the camera and reformat it there.

Hi Bill thanks for the tip. I actually never reformat the card after putting it back in. Would not doing this be the cause??? This is something i will start doing every time. Thanks.

Cards do go bad, so it could be a bad card, but the first thing to try would be to format it in camera. The 5DII instructions specifically say to do this.