Nikon D70s camera

[Lucifer]

I recently bought a Nikon D70s camera from a online auction.
It came with everything I need except a memory card.
I have a 64 MB CF card which is enough to test it.
I have plenty of microSD cards so I bought an adapter.
I tried a 16 GB, a 8 GB, and a 2 GB. Each time I used the camera
format function. Only the 2 GB card worked properly.
I then tried a 4 GB CF card. That showed I had 79 shots left.
Looking at the card through the USB showed the camera
had formatted it to 266 MB. Windows disk manager showed
it had 4 partitions. I used disk manager to format it with 1
partition of 3.7 GB to FAT format. Now the camera shows
1.1 K shots remaining at the highest JPEG setting.

It's the D70s so there is no firmware update.
It's there a known bug with the D70s formatting cards
over 2 GB?

[Computer Nerd Kev]

Post by Lucifer
I recently bought a Nikon D70s camera from a online auction.
It came with everything I need except a memory card.
I have a 64 MB CF card which is enough to test it.
I have plenty of microSD cards so I bought an adapter.
I tried a 16 GB, a 8 GB, and a 2 GB. Each time I used the camera
format function. Only the 2 GB card worked properly.

That equates to the difference between standard SD cards and SDHC,
the latter use a slightly modified protocol which your CF adapter
would have to support. Either it doesn't, or there's some bug in
it.

From a very quick web search it looks like the D70 pre-dates exFAT
so make sure that you don't use that if formatting with a PC.
Windows won't let you format anything over 32GB as FAT32, but that's
just M$ being a pain, Linux will do it up to 2TB.

Post by Lucifer
I then tried a 4 GB CF card. That showed I had 79 shots left.
Looking at the card through the USB showed the camera
had formatted it to 266 MB. Windows disk manager showed
it had 4 partitions.

I'm not sure why there would be four partitions, assuming it
wasn't that way before you tried formatting with the camera.

Post by Lucifer
I used disk manager to format it with 1
partition of 3.7 GB to FAT format. Now the camera shows
1.1 K shots remaining at the highest JPEG setting.
It's the D70s so there is no firmware update.
It's there a known bug with the D70s formatting cards
over 2 GB?

(1,100 / 79) * 256MB = 3,565MB, which seems close enough to using
full capacity, so it seems like it's able to access a pre-formatted
4GB card well enough (of course the real test is in filling it up
with photos).

It's quite possible that the firmware doesn't support formatting
such large cards, either by mistake or just by choice in order to
cut costs (such big cards weren't available anyway back at time of
manufacture). But I don't know that for a fact.

There's hacked firmware available for some Nikon DSLRs, probably not
ones as old as this though. Canon cameras are much more widely
supported by their unofficial firmware projects.
https://nikonhacker.com