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How-to format a SD Card on every OS  

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Florian
(@florian)
Active Member
How-to format a SD Card on every OS

Hello Everybody,

I had like 10 different cards some from Cameras some from raspberry Pi projects and some micro sd cards from old fones. Some where working fine on my Printer (I3MK3s) some not. Today i took the time and effort to find the root cause of that issue and want to share my newly gained wisdome with you. I'm sure there is a artical about that somewhere but i was not able to finde it so i will write it.

On Mac:

You can inspect your drives with the command:

diskutil list

The Output will look something like this:

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *15.5 GB disk2
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk2s1
2: Microsoft Basic Data PRUSA 15.3 GB disk2s2

You will notice that it is a GUID partition schema, which is the same as GPT. Prusa Printers are not capable of interpreting this schema. They only can "understand" MBR partition schema.

To format a Disk with the right MBR use this command. (Make sure disk2 is your sdcard from the diskutils comand before!!!)

diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 PRUSA MBRFormat disk2

After the task is finished rerun:

diskutil list

The Output now should look like this.

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *15.5 GB disk2
1: DOS_FAT_32 PRUSA 15.5 GB disk2s1

On Windows:

If your your on Windows you have to format your sd kart by cmd or by Powershell not just the right-click Format option.

- CMD wold be all of that commands from top to bottom.

diskpart
list disk
select disk # (replace # by the right disk)
clean
convert mbr
create partition primary
format fs=fat32 quick
active
assign
exit

PowerShell would be:

#List all drives

Get-Disk

# Clear a disk regardless of whether it contains data or OEM partitions
Clear-Disk -Number 1 -RemoveDataRemoveOEM
 
#Inizialze the freshly cleand disk with a mbr partition.
Initialize-Disk 1 -PartitionStyle MBR
 
#Generate a new Partition
New-PartitionDiskNumber 1 -AssignDriveLetterUseMaximumSize
 
# List all volumes
Get-Volume
 
# Format volumes with FAT32
Format-Volume -DriveLetter # -FileSystem FAT32 -Confirm:$false (replace the # with the right drive letter from the command before)
 
On UNIX:
 
list yur drives
sudo fdisk -l
 
On Debian style Unix install mbr
sudo apt-get install mbr
Reformat the Partition schema
install-mbr /dev/sdx (replace the x in sdx by your drive)

Format the Partiton to FAT32
sudo mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdx1 -n 'NameOfYourDrive'


hope it helps someone.
PS: if your a RHEL user you will probably figure it out, should be strait forward.





 

 

Posted : 07/03/2021 3:29 pm
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