SD card help!

[jovian]

Hi everyone,


I recently bought some bigger SD cards (Sandisk Ultra 32 GB) to make room for all these games I'm emulating. However, whenever I format one to a Pandora SD card, it only shows up as 0.99 GB.


I checked in both the Pandora itself and my laptop, and both show only about 1 gig of space.


When I format the card using Gparted on Pandora or my Windows laptop, it shows the correct amount of space. But when I change it into a Pandora SD card, it goes back to 0.99 GB.


I figured it could be partitioned--but no, disk manager in Windows shows that it should have 32 GB of space on one partition. Yet my system itself is saying 0.99! Same story in Gparted and when I check the disk's properties in Pandora.


Here's a picture.


I have no idea what to do. How can I get the right amount of space AND make it a Pandora-compatible SD card?

 

[Askarus]

format one to a Pandora SD card


What do you mean?


Format to a Pandroa SD?

 

[jovian]

Yeah, when I go to "Create a Pandora SD Card" and make the SD card into a Pandora-compatible SD card with the right directories to add files into.

 

[jovian]

sorry for the double post but WOW I am stupid. I didn't realize formatting was OPTIONAL...I have all my space now!


However, I'm still pretty curious as to why formatting with the Pandora SD Card program would reduce the space to apparently 0.99 GB...that's a weird little glitch.

 

[Binky]

Perhaps its neglecting to leave 4Mb empty at the start of the volume?

 

[Wally]

Where did you buy your SD card?

 

[Askarus]

Good to see it works now.

 

[omega-weapon]

I bought some 32gb Sandisk SD cards this week too. Both of which when Formatted from the Pandora, gave me 0.99gb of space, I just formatted them on my PC and created the folders manually, which works perfectly.


It's not just you then, so maybe it is a bug in the Formatting program? Hmmm...

 

[urjaman]

The mkfs.vfat in pandora seems to be quite puzzled by anything bigger than 2GB -> my guess is it was not built with largefile support. I played around creating a sparse file of "32GB" and trying to directly mkfs it - result is mkfs.vfat: unable to stat test32G. (Note. If i used mkfs.vfat -C and tried to create >2GB sparse filesystem file that way it was mkfs.vfat: seek failed) But when I attached that file to a loopback device and made the filesystem that way, result is "Loop device does not match a floppy size, using default hd params" ... and it creates a 1GiB filesystem. There is still the thing that the real disk (SD) is not a loop device, so I'm not sure what the excuse is then, but I'm quite sure we need a better build of dosfstools. Also, adding "-F 32" to the invocation in the script might be useful since I found documentation fixes to mkdosfs 2.11 (the one we have) manpage in ubuntu saying that it by default only autodetects between FAT12 (floppy) and FAT16 (<=2GiB) - and I'm pretty sure nobody is trying to use an SD that one cannot put FAT32 on (minimum is something way less than 1GiB IIRC...).

 

[zounder1]

It would appear the utility on the Pandora is limited to 1GB formatting of vfat.  I'm guessing this is due to an out of date dosfstool package installed on the Pandora.

https://community.freescale.com/thread/280951

How does one go about requesting an update to the firmware to include an update to dosfstools?

 

[Nathriel]

I had the same problem, but did not come to such a realization. My solution was to format it on my laptop to fat32, download software there (since I have not fixed the "Failed to execute default Web Browser - Input/output error." message yet), and then pop the SDHC card back into my Pandora.

I am pleased to know the solution was in front of me the whole time ^^

 

[thatgui]

download software there (since I have not fixed the "Failed to execute default Web Browser - Input/output error." message yet), and then pop the SDHC card back into my Pandora.

You don't need a browser to download software onto your Pandora. Use PndStore (its in the main xfce window between "Switch Gui" and "About Xfce" / System Tab in Minimenu) to download PNDManager, which is a far more comfortable way to bring software onto your Pandora.