Fat16

[cozmo72]

hello ive been told i need to format my smc card using FAT16. ive got a card reader, and when i put my smc card in the card reader and try to format it i only have FAT and FAT32 as options, im using xp media edition and i was wondering is there anyway i can format this using FAT16 on my comp.

thanx

 

[Squidge]

"FAT" should do the trick, or you could find a Win95 machine. . .

 

[Tobriand]

FAT on newer versions of windows *probably* means Fat16, although conceivably it could be Fat12 (like Fat16 but for smaller drives). If I were you, I'd try just using that and see if it worked. Also bear in mind you might want to set the cluster size as low as possible - a small cluster size means you get more space out of your card, although the read/write speed probably drops a little. If there are more clusters then more read operations are necessary (although they may take less time - I don't know enough to say whether this is so or not, however).

Since you're often dealing with lots of small files on an SMC, though, you'll find that you can lose as much as say 10mb (actually, nearing 30 for Aquafish's Advance Wars GP) on routine storage bitsies.

Personally, I find the extra space useful, although if saving times are important to you, leaving well enough alone might be more sensible - up to you.

Hope this helps

 

[cozmo72]

thanks for that mate, but ive tried FAT. When i put the smc card in the gp32 after formating it on that and open the gpmanager it says error occured, and when i clcik on anything in the gpmanager it times out. ive used my firends card and that works fine on it. i read somehwre that somebody put new cards in then pulled them out quickly and shoved the old card in so that got formatted with the gpmanager. i tried that using my friends smc but it wiped his card when i pulled it out and how hes in the same situation as me :unsure: ive herd that i need FAT 16 to get the card working in my gp32 though.

thanx again

 

[mrsnature]

http://l33t.spod.org/ratx/gp32/smcrecover/

 

[cozmo72]

thanx alot for that mate but what does cluster size mean?

 

[Tobriand]

On any piece of storage media, there is a certain ammount of space. However, because of the way machines work (or possibly simply to speed things up - choosing a cluster size of 1 bit would be painfully slow for almost anything, if even possible) they prefer to deal in chunks.

Think of an SMC a bit like a library filled with empty books numbered 1 to god knows how many. When you write something to your SMC, a mechanical arm is scribbling inside the books whatever it is you're putting on your SMC. Like in life, some stories/files span several books - war and peace in 1 volume isn't entirely sensible, let alone the average encyclopaedia. However, again, just as in real life, you can't have lots of books in the same volume - there's only room for one name on the cover (except in the case of compilations, but lets not go there). So if there's empty space at the end of a book, it just gets wasted.

Not a problem if you're only dealing with very large files, but if you're dealing with smaller ones or space *really* matters, then the cumulative loss is fairly big - there's only so much paper in the hypothetical library.

The response to this could be "let's make the books shorter" - what I was going on about earlier. This means, of course, that there's less chance of white space at the end of a file, and even if there is some, it'll probably be less. However, the mechanical arm has to do more moving, and if you've ever worked wth mechanical arms, you know how slow they are, although seeing as there's less weight in the book (this arm, I'd like you to imagine, is very sensitive to things like that) due to less paper, it might make its movements faster.

The other is to leave books the same size they were and not even go near the read/write speed loss. There are advantages to both, but generally, the smaller cluster size is more useful. SOME programs can have trouble with it though, if you're unlucky.

Hope that cleared up clusters - if anyone has any corrections to make, please do so - its too late for me to be writing this anyway, so there's a good chance the analogy isn't watertight.

 

[GA01]

If you have got access to a Windows 2000 computer then use that to format your SMC. I made the same mistake by formatting in XP (same errors) but 2000 sorted me out.