I'm bringing this thread back after an interesting discovery this week. It should have occurred to me, but it didn't, so maybe someone else will benefit from this process.

My Nikon digital camera (Coolpix 5600--a marvelous little camera) started showing the dreaded red X in a box on a couple of images when I opened the card in Explorer. I didn't think much of it the first time, but it kept happening, and then a message popped up from Windows that I should run chkdsk on this drive. I happened to run into one of our library IT guys yesterday and I asked him where to find it, because I'd poked around looking for access to a DOS domain to run it and had no luck.

It's an easy answer, also something I should have/probably eventually would have found by myself, but here it is: right click on the drive (in this case, "O") and bring up the standard windows dialog box. Click on the Tools tab and you'll find several diagnostic tools. I ran the one to fix any files and bad sectors, then on a lark, I clicked on Defrag. It's a small card, 256Meg, and it was an amazing array of red bars throughout the display. I cleaned it up and it seems to be fine, and loaded a little faster when I reopened it just now (I have to dump a bunch of images I've downloaded, then I'll run it one more time to see if I can get the last few little red bars out of the picture).

Something you might want to do before you head out with the digital camera for the family vacation. You don't want to lose any of them due to a tangled mess on the card.

SRS