SmartMedia Formatting problem

[WideBodiedEng]

I had a 128 mb SmartMedia card which now has failed. It happened after I downloaded my photos from my camera through an Internal 7 in 1 Digital Media Drive I bought from a certain electronic dealer last year. After it failed I looked on the net and found that these readers are not recommended for SmartMedia. If the card is written to by Windows at all, then the format is lost and the camera can't reformat it, even though it recognises that it does need formatting.
So how do I recover the card? I understand it is possible to get drivers from the manufacturers but I cant get the manufacturer's website as there is no info on the drive. I see from various fora that I need SMPREP.EXE. I got it but when I run it, it says it needs a .dll (smapi.dll)?
And its almost impossible to get the cards. I was lucky to get 2 64Mb ones, but they cost a fortune. I paid over 1000 euro for the camera (Olympus C40 Zoom bought when they were expensive) and I cant bear the thought of throwing it out just yet.
I've written to both the dealer and Olympus but got no reply from the dealer and no useful reply from Olympus.
So maybe one of you folks has the gen!
Thanks

[NutLoose]

see

http://www.supermediastore.com/memory-faq.html

cant understand why you cannot get new cards though, their site also sells them and look on ebay, you will get them cheap too

[WideBodiedEng]

Thanks

Thanks for that. I cant find any for sale there. They do describe them and say theyre discontinued.
I'll try e-bay though.

What I really want is to recover the card

[NutLoose]

The FAQ above tells you how to attempt to recover it.......... as for ebay had a look and there are hundreds on there