On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 11:58:32AM -0700, Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote: > The greatest likelihood, if you're using NiMH batteries, is that they > are unable to sustain the power demanded by the transfer > consistently. NiMH batteries seem to be best at modest duration > bursts on power delivery. Pentax recommends using the external power > supply when connected to a computer for file transfer. > > This is conjecture ... if the problem is happening when you're > connected and using known good CRV3 or AA Lithiums, then I don't know > what the problem might be.
I never had a problem transferring up to 1Gb over the USB cable (other than the fact that it took for ever :-) using NiMh batteries in the camera, and transferring from a Microdrive (higher drain). [Actually, that's not entirely true - once I got the battery grip I had several transfer problems; enough to make it my custom to remove the battery grip before uploading. Now I just use an external reader. Not because it's faster - my computer only has USB 1.1 - but because it's less trouble. That, and the fact that at present I'm not entirely sure where the USB cable has got to] Personally I'd suspect the other end of the USB cable - it has been my experience that Windows is not particularly robust when it comes to errors on a remote disk drive (be it a networked drive, a share from a remote computer, or a USB or firewire removeable drive). Far too often, any error during a transfer results in the drive disappearing, just as you report.
