[Hooligan]

Hi,

I recently had a customer who claimed after plugging in a Sony Digital Camera his PC crashed and asked for a system disk.
When I checked it out his install had basically vanished. Most of his data was there.

Anyway... we decided I would clean reinstall Windows, drivers etc and recover his data as he had a lot of unwanted garbage anyway. He took the PC home, plugged in the camera and it happened again.

This time he brought me the PC and camera. I re-reinstalled all and then ghosted his HDD jic. When I plugged in the camera it just worked. PC exhibited other problems, eventually found it had a faulty sound card.

Basically we hoped this was causing the 'plug in camera, Windows goes bye-bye' problem. 2 months later he is still happy.
Today I get another PC in. User installed PCI2USB ports plugged in camera and now asks for system disk. Sony Camera again!

Anyone out there experience or know about this? It has to be common, 2nd PC with same problem for me in 2 months. By the way first PC is AMD Athlon running Win2k (forget the rest of it) which I built. 2nd one is IBM Aptiva with Win 98, so machines are very different.

 

[johnwill]

I never heard of this, and I'm having difficulty with how it could happen. I'm assuming these are Firewire cameras...

 

[Hooligan]

No they are USB. I have not actually seen what happens, I only get to see the aftermath. I can assure you though the first guy is not stupid. He doesn't fiddle, has had the PC over two years and this is the only time he has needed help, so I believe him when he says all he did was plug the camera in. It would just be nice to know if there is an issue so that people can be warned. Also I have a Sony Movie Camera, uses USB and Firewire, never had a problem.

 

[johnwill]

Well, you got me! I've never heard of this, and it would have to be a really bad driver to do that kind of damage... Of course, being produced by Sony, I suppose that's possible.

 

[clintfan]

The camera will be treated like a removable drive. It doesn't use TWAIN like older camera products. I'm suspecting when it went out for mounting, Windows got confused about what was camera and what was C-drive.

In searching around, I found this link which gave some general info about Sony camera software setup. No specific answers to your problem though, just background info.

What was interesting about was that it's clear you have to use Sony's USB drivers to hook up these cameras. If you did that clean install but didn't put those drivers on, then all bets are off IMO. There are probably other related Windows Update bug-fix stuff that would be useful too.

Hope this helps,

-clintfan

 

[Hooligan]

Thanks people, still no answers though. I formatted the HDD and started again. It just works for me. I don't know what they are doing to make it fail. Maybe it's just coincidence and I won't come accross it again.
Thanks

 

[clintfan]

One more idea.

With our Olympus C50, they specifically warn you not to disconnect or connect the camera while the photo software is running. So the order is always supposed to be:

1. connect camera
2. run photo software
3. exit photo software
4. disconnect camera

In your case maybe you have a different problem, since my impression was that all you had to do was plug the camera in and the problem would occur (though I didn't get an answer about the drivers). But more than likely the user is not religiously following the sequence above

-clintfan

 

[Hooligan]

Note that they both claimed it happenned the first time they connected the camera. Sorry Clintfan, I misread your post, I now realise it would have been good to fiddle with the camera before putting CD in just to see if anything funny goes on. I don't really have time to fiddle around as customer pays for time, maybe next time it happens (which is hopefully never). Thanks again.