My camera has been working fine up until today. It now reads "Preparing SD Card" when I open the camera app. Also even when I try to view photos i've already taken from the gallery it says "please wait" with no media found in the background.

Seems like for some reason it's having trouble recognizing the SD card.

I can play music from my SD card and also watch videos I have on there so it can't be corrupt. Also if I open astro, I can navigate to the DCIM\camera folder and look at my pictures with the default viewer. I've tried rebooting the phone but that does not seem to help. Any other suggestions?

Have you tried removing the USB card and then reinserting it?

Thanks, I just tried that, also pulled the battery for giggles and it still does the same thing. Funny though, if I switch it to camcorder mode it works fine, but then when i put it back to camera mode i get the preparing sd card message again.

I had a two fold problem. First the preparing SD card issue that the OP had mentioned. Then my battery was draining ridiculously fast. I could go from full to 20% in 6hrs with minimal to no use. Looking at the battery use, it showed 'Media' using 75% of the juice so obviously something with this SD card was seriously messed up, making me unable to use my camera and draining the battery.

What I ended up doing was backing up my data from the phone on my computer, then going from the main screen -> Settings -> SD card & phone storage -> Format SD card.

After that, my 'preparding SD card issue went away' and media went back to using the 5-8% of battery it normally uses.

Valorale, glad to see that someone else also had the same problem I am having.
I also discovered that CPU utilization was at 100% after having the camera issue. Eventually I was able to get my camera to work again, but the battery was draining like crazy. I discovered that CPU was "pegged" and that was causing the big drain.
I tried backing up and formatting my SD card, which worked great until I put my files back on, then the issue came back. I reformatted several times and each time I tried a different method to move files and even tried different files. Each time, after I got a certain amount of files on there, the issue came back.
I took my phone back to the verizon store and they gave me a new SD card (this after they had replaced my battery - before I discovered the CPU issue). The new SD card did not help for long. After I got approximately 3.4 Gb of files onto my card, you guessed it, same issue.
I posted my problem in the Motorola forums and no response so far. I also tried setting the phone back to factory default settings, getting rid of all my apps. That did not help either, expect perhaps to let me know it was not an app causing the issue.
The Verizon store is going to get me a new phone on Monday (two days from now) as they are sold out (again) today. The droid is the best phone I've ever hard. Hands down best call quality, works best with my bluetooth car radio both for streaming media and for phone calls. It is awesome for gmail and facebook and the apps are really wonderful. If I can just get the SD card issue cleared up, I'll be in absolute heaven.
Anyone else out there had this problem?

H*app*y New year everyone!

I had this problem with my wife's droid after adding a lot to the SD card. I shut it down and pulled the battery. Then I put it back in and rebooted the droid and things went back to normal.

Tonight I've been adding stuff to my droid, sometimes a lot, sometimes just a few small files. Sometimes it prepares the SD card really quickly, a couple times it took 20+ minutes and eventually the SD card was prepared. Could the delay be due to SD card fragmentation/organization and seem random depending on where the manipulated files are stored?

a possible fix

I had this problem, and I found it was caused by my copying a partially convefted video file to the sd card. When I tried to play it not only did it not work, but I saw in my system monitor that my cpu was running at 100%.

A temporary solution is to kill the camera process. I use Advanced Task Killer app for that. Next time you run the camera it will be fine, but, and here's the kicker, once you restart the phone you will be in the same boat.

The only permanent solution I've found is to find the offending file and delete it.

I think that is originally what caused my problem, I was copying a video to the phone, it looked like it finished so I told the phone to dismount. Then due to my natural impatience I probably pulled the USB cord before it had time to finish that process.

I had this problem yesterday and as soon as I uninstalled Aurora the problem went away. I had just reinstalled Aurora earlier in the day to see if that would get rid of the force close issues it has. Apparently it was even more problematic than I thought, though this is the only time I have had the camera issue.