Canon T3i Dead

[inno]

So... here's my situation. I just got the t3i this week (thank you citibank points!) excited, I went ahead and played around with it. and my battery drained, but not all the way. so I go and charge the camera, battery is fully charged and I stick it back into the camera. Yay more fun! I turned off the camera and then decided i want to shoot some more and turned the camera back on. Everything is dead at this point. LCD screen stays black (I hit the disp. button at the top), I tried to turn on the flash and the flash won't pop up, can't focus with lens, etc... The only time to get the camera working again is if I were to re-seat the battery. 

What's going on?

[TCampbell]

Cards *can* be considered "bootable" and hold firmware (which is how Magic Lantern firmware works).  Usually they don't -- but they can.

Who knows what might have been on the card -- it may have been nothing more than a bad block which was still marked as usable.  We'd need the ability to trace the interactions of the camera firmware with the card to be sure (which probably only Canon can do).  

I have had occurances where a person used a card in one camera and discovered that a different camera had problems with that same card until they refermatted it.  Reformatting a card is a good practice to eliminate a potential source of problems.

I'm just glad inno's camera is working again without needing to deal with the hassles of trying to return/exchange/repair it.

[inno]

i can't believe it was something as simple as that! T.T

[ebiggs1]

"i can't believe it was something as simple as that! T.T"

Perhaps it was not.   But at any rate glad to hear all is well. 

[ebiggs1]

I don't know Tim. That seems like a real stretch for the problem. The camera should work whether it has a SD card in it or not.

I will test this myself on my son's T3i later.

When I had my five Rebels, I used the cards without thought and never had an issue. Plus I use the CF cards interchangeably with my 1 Series now. I do believe in formatting before a critical shoot. And to use more smaller cards than fewer large cards.

[guitareth]

My T3i had totally inoperative LCD screen. It would take pictures (although I couldn’t see them) but would not go into video mode. I changed to a different SD card and then it worked. I assume there were too many files even though there was plenty of free space. After I relocated a bunch of files from under DCIM folder the first SD card started working.

[jrhoffman75]

Very strange. But on another note, the camera SD card is not where you should be storing photos. Get them off the card onto your computer and then reformat the card.