I just got my sp303 from my local shop today. It's in about newish condition, so I don't think it's broken. The memory cards I have though, seem to be. When I try to initialize, it says to hold down the Cancel & Remain buttons, so that the FM shows up on the lcd. I only see it for a split second, but it won't let me select bank C & D. I really don't want to regret buying this, because I came home with the Yamaha SU200 and returned it a hour and a half later. (It's too tricky to use) Yeah, they still have the other sp303 at the store, but I don't know if it would do me any good to exchange one for the other just so I can format these 2 cards I have. (One even seems to be the 16MB smart media card Roland gave it!!)

Anything I'm missing here? I'm screwed if I'm stuck with just the internal memory (which goes rather quick).

I'll just have to assume you gotta be careful with the cards, and waste another $20-30 on eBay for another. But this sure puts a damper on things for at least a week!!

Yeah impossible to tell really if its the card or not.. so just gonna have to try again..

have you tried formatting the card in a computer, then formatting it in the 303? for some reason this helped me once with a memory card issue

yes, try as cartesia said, who knows...

Not sure how I'll format them from my mac. I plug them in my usb card reader, and it says everything works. Does anybody happen to know how you'd format it?