Hacking Formatting emuNAND option eats up MAXIMUM SD Card space.

[Icy]

Is this a thing?

Both of my SD Cards have their sized greatly reduced after an format emunand option using Gateway launcher.

My 2GB SD card became 911 MB

My 4GB SD card became 2.77 GB

Or am I missing something?

 

[DarkKaine]

Yes, this is normal.
It creates a new partition which holds emuNAND.

 

[Icy]

So there's no way to access those "partition" back? I'm thinking 1GB is too big but it's fine anyway.

 

[tarovisions]

So there's no way to access those "partition" back? I'm thinking 1GB is too big but it's fine anyway.

Nope, has to be that size to match the real nand if you were wondering

 

[Icy]

Nope, has to be that size to match the real nand if you were wondering

Oh I see. I was curious if they stacked since I formatted the emuNAND like a quadruple times before.

 

[Nollog]

Gateoway will always create the emunand partition at the same memory position.

There's a program somewhere here what someone made to make it so you can have more than one emunand on a single sd card.

 

[RodrigoDavy]

SD cards are really inexpensive nowadays even in my country. Buy an SD card with higher capacity and you should be fine

 

[Typhin]

Is this a thing?

Both of my SD Cards have their sized greatly reduced after an format emunand option using Gateway launcher.

My 2GB SD card became 911 MB

My 4GB SD card became 2.77 GB

Or am I missing something?

This is normal, yes. Your emuNand resides in a separate partition on the card. The partition doesn't show up normally because the computer doesn't know how to read from it, but you can see it using a partition manager (such as Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Disk Management in Windows). This partition will be around 1 GB in size, and you can use the emuNand Tool to easily extract/restore it for backups. If you are no longer going to use the SD card in your 3DS, you can reclaim the space by redoing the partitions, Windows has a utility called Diskpart that can do this, and guides should be available pretty easily.

Each time you set up emuNand, the Gateway launcher clears out all partitions and sets them up again, so you only ever have one emuNand partition, you won't be losing a GB each time you do it. Trying to format the SD card through Windows only resets the "visible" partition, and won't touch or reclaim the emuNand partition's space.

I'd still recommend getting a larger card so you can have more room for installed CIAs, especially the larger ones, but that's a personal preference thing, I suppose.

I hope this helped answer your questions. If you have any more, please go ahead and ask them, and I'd be happy to help out.

 

[Icy]

Thank you for the help everyone.

I'm going to buy a 16GB SD card sooner or later. I was using the original SD Cards that the 3DSs came with.

 

[pdensco]

you can formate partition through Fat32Formatter

 

[MelonGx]

Panasonic SD Formatter can restore the size.

 

[Typhin]

Thank you for the help everyone.

I'm going to buy a 16GB SD card sooner or later. I was using the original SD Cards that the 3DSs came with.

There's guides on moving an emuNand from one card to another, but it's pretty easy.
- Use emuNand Tool to grab the emuNand off your old card
- Use "Setup Emunand" to partition the new card properly
- Use emuNand Tool to inject the emuNand onto the new card
- Copy all files from old card to new card
Done. Extra space, and nothing gets lost.