Ah, SmartMedia, the bane of my existence.
They don't go any larger than 128MB, they're expensive (how do you double the value of an Olympus C4000Z? Put the memory card in!
) and you'll only find them on the used market. They're not rare as such, Ebay is awash with them but the prices suck. $20 for 128MB is
cheap. Seriously.
It
should power up without a memory card in place though.
Electronics being what they are, it could be pristine on the outside and as dead as a can of Spam on the inside.