Can an SD Card be formatted?

[Cortex]

Hi all,

I'm having problems with a SanDisk 128 MB card....

I've tried it on 2 different handhelds and they both say there is 50 Mb being used even though File Explorer and ActiveSync say there is nothing on the card.

Is there a way to truely clear the memory?

[Janak Parekh]

Sure. There are tools like Flash Format (http://www.cnetx.com/format/), or you can plug it into a reader on your desktop and do a standard format process there.

--janak

[Cortex]

thanks
looks like a nice program

do you know if there are any problems if i choose 2k as the cluster size, in an attempt to not waste space?

[Janak Parekh]

do you know if there are any problems if i choose 2k as the cluster size, in an attempt to not waste space?
You mean FAT32 2k? No, it should be fine, although if you store a lot of files it may be slower to run CHKDSK or to run through the files.

--janak

[Cortex]

it came up as FAT 16 for the card before i formatted it

i then assumed wince is fat 16 based -- can i use fat 32 without difficulty?
what would be the advantage of fat 32 over fat 16 for an sd card i only use on my ppc?

i then used 2k cluster size and it seems to work ok.

[Janak Parekh]

Hmm, on a 128MB card you probably don't need FAT32, in fact, you shouldn't use it. For large cards (like a 1GB Microdrive), you can use FAT32 to achieve smaller cluster sizes. WinCE 3.0+ and PocketPC 2000+ work fine with FAT32.

--janak

[rave]

The missing 50MB may be lost clusters from a previous operation gone wrong. In any case, get either Flash Format or Storage Tools to either fix the problem or reformat the card. I personally use the FAT16 format with 2k cluster sizes on my 128MB card.

A word about the defrag feature available in Storage Tools: I don't think you need it. On hard drives, you need it, since it's faster to read consecutive clusters. But this is not an issue with Flash memory.

[Cortex]

thanks for the replies

the program worked wonders -- giving back about 60 megabytes!