Formatting SD Card

[dougal85]

Right, well I have a 2 gig SD card. I formatted it with my camera thinking it was the easiest way to delete all the pics.

However, its only showing up as 1 gb now. How do I format it to fix this? now if i format with my laptop it still only gives me 1gb. If i look at it with the disk manager in windows xp it shows up and 1 gb unpartitioned space. However, I can't delete the original partition or merge them or anything.

It's quite annoying needless to say.

[Horizon88]

I know it's probably a stupid question, but is the card locked? :P

And have you tried using something like gParted or another commercial disk formatting utility that could possibly handle it, other than the windows xp manager? I've had a couple disks it wouldn't recognize but I fired up a live disk and could format them fine.

[dougal85]

The only thing putting me off that idea is i don't imagine the sd card reader will work without being in windows. Are you aware of any that can do the job from in windows?

[Horizon88]

PartitionMagic, but I believe it's commercial.

[piersk]

I tried formatting a card in windows once then putting it my camera. The camera didn't like it. Often they format them in wierd directory structures. Try putting it into your camera and then find the "format card" option on your camera (usually in setup)

[rikmoncur]

formatting in camera should have worked.
But cards are FAT (or is it FAT32 ?) and windows xp is NTFS so you have to format the card as FAT (or FAT32).

I have heard of folks using another make of camera to format a card and it works ok then - perhaps you can get hold of a friend's camera?
That's all I can think of...

[Horizon88]

You could also check to see if there is an updated firmware for your camera - maybe it has an issue with 2gb cards in formatting? :/

[Fed up with FAT]

formatting in camera should have worked.
But cards are FAT (or is it FAT32 ?) and windows xp is NTFS so you have to format the card as FAT (or FAT32).

I have heard of folks using another make of camera to format a card and it works ok then - perhaps you can get hold of a friend's camera?
That's all I can think of...

I need to find out how to format a new SD card to be FAT or FAT32 compliant so that it is readable by the SD drive in my car. It is readable by my Windows XP laptop but not by the car SD drive. Can anyone help?:confused:

[Horizon88]

There should be a disk format utility built into Windows XP that will let you format it to FAT or FAT32 - I don't know where it is offhand since I don't run Windows anymore, but there's also a GParted LiveCD that should let you do it - http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

[Weedpacket]

When the card is visible to Windows as a drive then when that drive is selected "Format..." should be listed under the File menu. The dialogue that comes up when that's selected offers the feasible filesystems and capacities.

But I would see about getting the camera to do it (possibly with upgrades), first.