[Coco] SD card fix

[Darren A]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 4:20 PM, rietveld rietveld wrote:

>
> Hi. This is a response to Paul Thayer 's fb post about 16mb sd card
> formatting
> I am still at work so email is my only way to respond
>
> Try this fix:
>
> In Windows:
>  Open command prompt. Type “diskpart”.
> That will launch another window with a DISKPART> prompt.
>  In the Diskpart window, type “select disk 1” (or whatever number your SD
> card happens to be assigned to).
>  Type “clean”.
>  Diskpart will tell you when this is complete
>  Type “create partition primary”. This sets up the new partition (one big
> one ) for the drive.
>  Type “select partition 1” to select the partition you just created.
>  Type “active” to mark the selected partition as active.
> Type “format fs=ntfs quick” to format the drive.
>  Type “assign”.
> Type “exit” to leave the Diskpart program.
>
>  Your SD card will now be usable with Wind‎ows
>
>

If the goal is to be able to use a 16MB SD card with the CoCo SDC then what
you really want to do is format the card to install a FAT16 file system.

By default, the 'Format' command in Windows will choose FAT12 for cards of
that size.  You need to override the default cluster size by using the
/a:1024 option to specify a cluster size of 1024 bytes.  This will increase
the number of clusters beyond that which can be handled by FAT12, forcing
the tool to use FAT16 instead.

Example of a 'Format' command for card mounted as drive E:
   format E:  /fs:fat  /a:1024  /Q


- Darren