PRS-505 Sony PRS-505 not reading memory card

[paranormal]

Hello everyone.

Long time-lurker, first time poster and I'm hoping y'all can help. My friend got a Sony PRS-505 reader as a gift (second-hand) last Christmas. It never had a memory card, only books on the internal memory. A couple of months ago, she wanted me to upload some books for her so I did but I ran out of room so she bought a memory card. All was well for a while until I added some more books for her this past week and now her reader is going all funky.

After uploading the books and disconnecting the machine from the computer, the ereader shows the little spinning arrow indicating it's trying to upload, it does this for a minute or so, then shuts off and automatically starts up again (without anyone hitting the power button) and goes on this continuous loop of the spinning arrows, shut down and restart. If you remove the memory card, the cycle going nowhere stops and the reader stays on, just with no books.

We thought it could be her memory card because when I took it out of her machine and put it in mine (Aluratek), my reader didn't read it and it's a generic memory card, not the special Sony one you can get. So she bought a new one today and the same thing is happening.

A little bit of a history on this machine. Apparently my friend (who's laptop screen is shot) bought a wall adapter to plug in a USB cord and used it to charge her reader. After a while, either the voltage wasn't right because the reader the screen started looking odd and the device was quite warm to the touch.

At first it didn't want to turn on but she left it a week and it did start to work again, but her battery life was no longer good (she read on Sony somewhere I think, that if you're charging the reader and your computer goes in standby, it stops charging and actually drains the battery and ruins it???).

Just wondering if anyone has gotten the same memory card reader issue, or if this could be a by-product of possibly cooking the device using an alternate charging method?

[paranormal]

Ok so I tried reformatting the card and put about 9 books as a test and it worked. So then I went ahead and uploaded the same books that were on it previously and am running into the same issue.

Going through the book list, I did find one in LIT format as opposed to PDF or Epub. I deleted it and it's still doing the endless cycle of trying to upload the info from the card and shutting down and restarting.

Additionally, since I don't own the Sony, I'm simply dropping the files in the memory card from Windows and am not using any special Sony software. Again, this has worked well in the past.

[paranormal]

Well, it appears I may have found the issue. I once again formatted the card and then started putting the books back in one folder at a time. Once the folder was moved over, I would disconnect the device and see if it read the card. I would do this for each file and it took a while.

This worked until I got to one particular folder where I had added two ePub books. Lo and behold, the whole cycle mentioned in my first message started up again.

I went in and removed those two books and tried again. Voila! I kept adding the remaining folders and didn't encounter another issue so it must have been those two books that the card kept trying to read and couldn't. Don't know why it wouldn't just show "corrupted file" or something like my Aluratek does, instead of sitting there trying to read the darn thing and messing up.

The odder thing? My Aluratek reads those two books with no issue so go figure.

Hope this can help others if they run into something similar!

[dreams]

I'm glad you were able to get it figured out.

Thank you for coming back and letting us know. It really does help all of us to see the solutions.