Late last year, I bought a Psion Series 5 from eBay. It included a case, extra styluses, a modem, and a data cable. I loved the thing. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the device to recognize Compact Flash cards. Looking it up, this was a widely known issue, often caused by a tiny piece of the compact flash door breaking off inside of the device. This is supposed to press a button inside the device when the door is closed to activate the compact flash port. It seemed loose when I opened up the device, so I tried to fix it, and after days of messing with it off and on, it broke off, and nothing I did could get it to work.

Last week, I tried to work on the device to get it to work and it stopped working altogether. I bought a replacement and it came in Monday, and while the casing was in near perfect condition, the compact flash port still didn't work. Nothing inside was broken. I searched on the internet and found a YouTube video. They said to make sure to format the card in FAT16, which I have been doing this whole time.

Then they said to make sure that I left some space at the end of the drive unallocated. So I took my 2GB Compact Flash card and left about 200 MB unallocated, formatted it as FAT16.... And that FINALLY worked. I'm wondering if that was my problem the whole time. I hope this helped someone.... #Psion5 #PDA #CompactFlash #90sTech