FAT formatting in XP

[breadandbubbles]

I have a 4GB MiniSD card. when i insert it into ym PC, it tells me its formatted to FAT32.

by right clicking and choosing "Format", i hoped to be able to format it differentally, but FAT32 is the only opton.

I need to format it to FAT. the card came formatted that way, but i had to format it differentally for a little while. no w i cant get it back.

im a little upset. the card was pretty expensive. someone told me that windows doesnt like formatting things to FAT after 2gb? they suggested i run teh command "l: /fs:fat" (I: being my card reader)

that didnt work at all. "not recognized as an internal or external command" etc.

so, anyone have any suggestions?

[gamehead200]

I have a 4GB MiniSD card. when i insert it into ym PC, it tells me its formatted to FAT32.

by right clicking and choosing "Format", i hoped to be able to format it differentally, but FAT32 is the only opton.

I need to format it to FAT. the card came formatted that way, but i had to format it differentally for a little while. no w i cant get it back.

im a little upset. the card was pretty expensive. someone told me that windows doesnt like formatting things to FAT after 2gb? they suggested i run teh command "l: /fs:fat" (I: being my card reader)

that didnt work at all. "not recognized as an internal or external command" etc.

so, anyone have any suggestions?

You have to type "format" before that command.

So:

format i: /fs:fat

[CoffeeFiend]

Big cards like that can be an issue. FAT16 is normally limited to 2GB. It can be formatted to 4GB, but that's with very large clusters, and most utilities won't do it. FAT16 means 2^16 clusters total (65536). So 2GB is 2097152KB / 65536 clusters, which makes 32KB clusters. Or 64KB clusters for 4GB (if you can trick something in formatting it that way).

The real problem is camera support for FAT32. On newer cameras you can pretty much take it for granted, but my "old" (but perfectly fine) DSLR doesn't support it. That's likely the case with more older electronics (cell phones and PDAs perhaps?). They just weren't expecting flash memory to drop in price so quickly I guess (back when I bought my DSLR the cheapest 1GB cards were 600$) - and often they won't release a firmware update as they'd rather sell you a new and expensive device you don't need just to get FAT32 support... Using this 64KB cluster trick some of them will work, but there's always that slight chance something will go wrong, and your card's contents will be corrupt.

If whatever device you want to use this card in doesn't support FAT32, you have 2 main options:

1) formatting with huge clusters using 3rd party utils - that's OK if it's just to put MP3's on it or something (data that's not so important that you have backed up somewhere else already)

2) buying a couple 2GB cards. They're dirt cheap now (like 30$), will format easily as plain old FAT16, and will work safely in any device, no special formatting required, no chance of data corruption. I personally went with this one, there's no point in even risking losing 2GB worth of photos to save on a 30$ card. Safe, cheap, hassle-free, and still fits quite a bit of photos or whatever on it.

[breadandbubbles]

wow. both those replies were really helpful. i REALLY appreciate it.

Crahak, that was AWESOME, and i understand so much more, but theres still some things im missing here. i feel stupid not understanding, but are you saying putting 4GB to use with the FAT system is risky? i thought it was just loss of performance? like speed or maximum capacity or something like that?

[breadandbubbles]

alright, i chose clusters of 64. it mentions compatibility issues, but thats all. if it works with my device, i have nothing to worry about?

[CoffeeFiend]

The main thing is not performance, but rather that it's wasteful. A 1 byte file takes 64KB. A 65537 byte file takes 128KB. With smaller clusters there's less "loss".

As for working, if it seems to work, you may be OK, but you can never be totally sure. I wouldn't trust any important data to it, especially with the price of 2GB cards nowadays. Depends how much you value your data, and how remote the risk is (or seems to be). I'm not taking any chances - I value my photos very much. But if it was just to store mp3's or such I'd just fill it up (formatted with huge clusters). There are known issues with using 64KB clusters with some hardware/software though (like old versions of windows). There VERY often are some bugs associated with this - like not seeing the free space properly (and hence things like a camera reporting a wrong # of photos' worth of space left on the card)

And that's just a temp fix if I may say... Cheap 8GB cards are just around the corner, and you're just not going to use 128KB clusters.

[breadandbubbles]

so youd suggest using clusters of 32?

it asked me if i wnated to use 64 "(y/n)". i chose yes, but if i said no, would it have gone with 32 instead? i guess it would be better to go that way?

[CoffeeFiend]

Well, with 32kb clusters, you could only use half of the card... I'm not really suggesting anything (other than perhaps buying a 2GB card for whatever device doesn't support FAT32 -- newegg has some 2GB MiniSD on for $14.49)

[breadandbubbles]

well sir, thank you very much.

[RJM]

HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool - v2.1.8

This utility will format any USB flash drive, with your choice of FAT, FAT32, or NTFS partition types.

Optionally you can also make the disk BOOTABLE by specifying a file location. Use the Windows 98 system files available here.

FIXES:

Allows creation of a FAT32 volume larger than 32 GB.

Fixes installation issue where installation process stopped after the earlier version of software was uninstalled and the new software was not automatically installed. The installation process now restarts automatically to install the new software after uninstalling the older version.

http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=197