# 7D unresponsive and beeps



## dsutherld (Jun 21, 2012)

I was on a shoot last night when out of no where, my 7D locked up, was unresponsive, would not turn off and had a long low beep. The only way to reset it was to take the battery out. Why did it do that?


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Jun 21, 2012)

Did it do it just once, or many times? Did it happen again if you changed memory cards?
My first thought is that it came accross a unwriteable memory block on your card and hung. 

If it works after the power reset, try the following: 
First, transfer all the images to your computer, then use a card reader (in Windows) run checkdisk with the scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors box checked. This checks every sector, even the empty ones. If you find bad sectors on the card, its likely that the card was the issue.
After that, do a low level format, followed by a in-camera format. The first test will find and report bad sectors, so it provides feedback to you without changing anything.
Note, a in camera format of a CF card does not check or map out bad memory blocks, it merely marks the fat table to tell the camera that the card is empty. It might be months, weeks, or just seconds before the camera trys to write to the bad block again, and then it can hang.
It takes a while to scan all the sectors on a large card, so be patient, I just did it to a 16GB card, it took about 5 minutes.
I hope thats the issue, because its a simple fix. Having a bad sector on solid state memory does not mean the card is dying, it does occasionally happen, but, if you check your card once a week and see it happinng again, then the card is dying.

If its not a bad card, you do not have too many other options. To a total camera reset to return everything to its default status. Sometimes switching to a non electronic lens like a Samyang has also caused me problems that were resolved by a full camera reset (this is a known issue).


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## Admin US West (Jun 22, 2012)

As a card is filled up, the chances of trying to a bad memory cell increases to 100%, assuming there is a error on the card. Let us know what you find.


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## revup67 (Jul 7, 2012)

Mt. Spokane is right..go to a DOS prompt (assuming you have a Windows PC). First know the drive letter - when you insert into the card reader if the card shows up as G or H etc.

Now, look for the Windows key on tour keyboard (it has the windows flag) hold it down then press R. At the run command type: cmd 

then press enter.

At the DOS prompt type: chkdsk /r x:

X is the drive letter you determined your card was at. note the space between chkdsk and the forward slash. The forward slash "R" implies it will not only check the card (fix errors) but will also attempt to recover any readable data then mark any bad sectors found on the card so they can't be used again.

Hope this helps you.


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