Hacking Migrate from exFAT to FAT32.

zxzxq · Mar 11, 2023

My console is on version 16.0.0 and Atmosphere 1.5.0, I use emunand.
My SD card is in exFAT and I have read that this can cause problems in the long run, my question is how can I change it to FAT32 without losing the game save files which is the most important thing.
I was thinking of making a backup of the emuMMC partition on my computer and in the same way making a backup of all the files on my SD, but FAT32 only accepts files up to 4GB, so what can I do?

Futurdreamz · Mar 11, 2023

A rather significant portion of Nintendo Switch games use files that are over 4gb in size and thus can't be loaded onto a fat32 drive, are you using game cartridges or digital downloads for your games? You could possibly compress or split the files into chunks smaller then 4GB, but then they would not be readable by the Switch as it isn't set up to recognized compressed or multipart files.

What are these long run problems that exFAT supposedly cause? I'm suspecting that list may be referring to when exFAT first came out and was not supported as well.

Reploid · Mar 11, 2023

Futurdreamz said:
A rather significant portion of Nintendo Switch games use files that are over 4gb in size and thus can't be loaded onto a fat32 drive, are you using game cartridges or digital downloads for your games? You could possibly compress or split the files into chunks smaller then 4GB, but then they would not be readable by the Switch as it isn't set up to recognized compressed or multipart files.

What are these long run problems that exFAT supposedly cause? I'm suspecting that list may be referring to when exFAT first came out and was not supported as well.

I think switch pack games into chunk files less than 4gb in size, even if you not on fat32. exfat can be corrupted by homebrew apps. I once foiled my SD with retroarch, had to format it.

binkinator · Mar 11, 2023

zxzxq said:
My console is on version 16.0.0 and Atmosphere 1.5.0, I use emunand.
My SD card is in exFAT and I have read that this can cause problems in the long run, my question is how can I change it to FAT32 without losing the game save files which is the most important thing.
I was thinking of making a backup of the emuMMC partition on my computer and in the same way making a backup of all the files on my SD, but FAT32 only accepts files up to 4GB, so what can I do?

Correct. It’s the way Ninty implemented the exfat drivers. They do their best to ensure you are not writing to the SDCard when the Sytem shuts down. Homebrew and CFW on the SDCard? not so much. Exfat doesn’t have a backup allocation table so once you’re screwed…you’re really screwed and you lose data. This is bad(tm). For this reason the more stable FAT32 drivers are preferred. All modern software (Atmosphere, Hekate and almost all homebrew) are aware of the 4G limitation and automatically split files into 4G chunks so size limitations don’t enter the picture. It is highly recommended that you switch to FAT32 before you have exfat file system corruption.

If you have an emuMMC partition it is not associated with your exfat partition in any way. Do not format your hidden partition or you will lose your game saves.

You should make a backup of your hidden partition using Hekate before doing anything.

What you'll need:

Hekate

Steps:

You'll have to first boot into Hekate, and then go to the Tools tab.

After that choose Backup eMMC and then turn on SD emuMMC RAW Partition.

Pick SD emuMMC RAW GPP.

Once done, press Close, and go back to the Tools tab.

Pick Backup eMMC and then, and then turn on SD emuMMC RAW Partition.

Pick SD emuMMC BOOT0 & BOOT1.

Once the backup is done, plug your SD card into your PC and go to your /backup/xxxxxxxx/ folder and move all rawnand.bin.xx, BOOT0, and BOOT1 files to a safe place on your PC

A major portion of this was taken directly from: https://rentry.org/EmuNANDNewSDcard

You can simply copy paste the data from you current SDCard using a regular Windows PC.

Format the only partition you can see to FAT32.

Copy your data back from your PC to your new FAT32 partition and job done.

Futurdreamz · Mar 11, 2023

Reploid said:
I think switch pack games into chunk files less than 4gb in size, even if you on fat32. exfat can be corrupted by homebrew apps. I once foiled my SD with retroarch, had to format it.

well then i rescind my opinion on the matter.

zxzxq · Mar 11, 2023

binkinator said:
Format the only partition you can see to FAT32.

So, should I use GUIFormat to remove all viewable data, then copy it back to SD?

binkinator · Mar 11, 2023

zxzxq said:
So, should I use GUIFormat to remove all viewable data, then copy it back to SD?

Yes, but please make sure you back everything up first.

It’s also recommended to use 64k block size but if you use 32k (the default in GUIFormat, I believe) it won’t kill you.

zxzxq · Mar 11, 2023

binkinator said:
Yes, but please make sure you back everything up first.

Ok, ok, I'll do it.
In case something goes wrong, how do I recover everything through backup?

binkinator · Mar 11, 2023

zxzxq said:
Ok, ok, I'll do it.
In case something goes wrong, how do I recover everything through backup?

To recover…

delete the new /atmosphere/ and /bootloader/ directories you are about to make and then…

move/rename /atmosphere.bk to /atmosphere/
move/rename /bootloader.bk to /bootloader/

reboot

zxzxq · Mar 11, 2023

Hello again, I did the procedure and when opening hekate I got this error

Failed to mount SD card. (FatFS Error 13).
Make sure that a FAT partition exists..

binkinator · Mar 12, 2023

zxzxq said:
Hello again, I did the procedure and when opening hekate I got this error

Failed to mount SD card. (FatFS Error 13).
Make sure that a FAT partition exists..

seems the format didn’t work. No worries. Nothing wrong w/ your Switch. Just need to format the one partition with fat32 again. If it fails again, please take some screenshots on your PC of what you are doing so we can figure out what’s going on.

zxzxq · Mar 12, 2023

binkinator said:
Just need to format the one partition with fat32 again.

It worked! tysm for your help

binkinator · Mar 12, 2023

zxzxq said:
It worked! tysm for your help

Glad you’re sorted! Enjoy!

reign226 · Mar 23, 2023

Posted this yesterday but seems to have disappeared. I'm on exFAT and after migrating to FAT32 (64KB cluster), experience longer (80%) boot times, game loading times also appear to be measurably slower, bearable but very annoying considering I've gotten used to the faster load times on exFAT.

I did a sd card bench in hekate and its getting 90MB/s sequential read, 10 MB/s 4kiB random and around 3000 IOPS, which is par the course for my U3/A1 class SDXC card.

Is this a configuration problem, or is FAT32 just known to be slower?

Hayato213 · Mar 23, 2023

reign226 said:
Posted this yesterday but seems to have disappeared. I'm on exFAT and after migrating to FAT32 (64KB cluster), experience longer (80%) boot times, game loading times also appear to be measurably slower, bearable but very annoying considering I've gotten used to the faster load times on exFAT.

I did a sd card bench in hekate and its getting 90MB/s sequential read, 10 MB/s 4kiB random and around 3000 IOPS, which is par the course for my U3/A1 class SDXC card.

Is this a configuration problem, or is FAT32 just known to be slower?

Try 32kb cluster

TomSwitch · Mar 23, 2023

zxzxq said:
My console is on version 16.0.0 and Atmosphere 1.5.0, I use emunand.
My SD card is in exFAT and I have read that this can cause problems in the long run, my question is how can I change it to FAT32 without losing the game save files which is the most important thing.
I was thinking of making a backup of the emuMMC partition on my computer and in the same way making a backup of all the files on my SD, but FAT32 only accepts files up to 4GB, so what can I do?

Your saves are not there, it's in either sysnand or emunand. To switch to FAT32 is very easy. Make a backup of your files on exFAT ( simply copy everything ). Use hekate to format your sd to FAT32 keeping the location of your emunand ( takes just a few seconds ). Copy back your backup and it will just work. The whole process will just take some minutes.

Post automatically merged: Mar 23, 2023

reign226 said:
Posted this yesterday but seems to have disappeared. I'm on exFAT and after migrating to FAT32 (64KB cluster), experience longer (80%) boot times, game loading times also appear to be measurably slower, bearable but very annoying considering I've gotten used to the faster load times on exFAT.

I did a sd card bench in hekate and its getting 90MB/s sequential read, 10 MB/s 4kiB random and around 3000 IOPS, which is par the course for my U3/A1 class SDXC card.

Is this a configuration problem, or is FAT32 just known to be slower?

There is no difference in performance, just size of individual file and on a Switch tremendous risk of pain using exFAT with homebrew.

reign226 · Mar 23, 2023

I've tried both 32k and 64k cluster. It remains that in my case at least there is a perceptible performance drop on FAT32. I don't know if its a bug or some other problem, I will try with another SD Card. It remains that the card benches properly in hekate so I don't think its a card or hardware issue.

In terms of individual file actually there is no difference because by default all large files have been split to <4GB regardless of file system.

I'll do some timing test when i get home.

ghjfdtg · Mar 23, 2023

FAT32 is just slower but it's better than HOS randomly corrupting your filesystem. There is nothing you can do.

siralbani · May 27, 2023

binkinator said:
Correct. It’s the way Ninty implemented the exfat drivers. They do their best to ensure you are not writing to the SDCard when the Sytem shuts down. Homebrew and CFW on the SDCard? not so much. Exfat doesn’t have a backup allocation table so once you’re screwed…you’re really screwed and you lose data. This is bad(tm). For this reason the more stable FAT32 drivers are preferred. All modern software (Atmosphere, Hekate and almost all homebrew) are aware of the 4G limitation and automatically split files into 4G chunks so size limitations don’t enter the picture. It is highly recommended that you switch to FAT32 before you have exfat file system corruption.

If you have an emuMMC partition it is not associated with your exfat partition in any way. Do not format your hidden partition or you will lose your game saves.

You should make a backup of your hidden partition using Hekate before doing anything.

You can simply copy paste the data from you current SDCard using a regular Windows PC.

Format the only partition you can see to FAT32.

Copy your data back from your PC to your new FAT32 partition and job done.

I tried to make that backup but it shows "Fialed to find a partition...".
What to do?

eyeliner · May 28, 2023

ghjfdtg said:
FAT32 is just slower but it's better than HOS randomly corrupting your filesystem. There is nothing you can do.

HOS doesn't corrupt the filesystem. Don't be silly. Certain apps do, and neither HOS or games do that.
I have exFAT for about since the release of the console and never had an issue.
Stop or change your habit of force stopping apps and use apps developed by competent developers or specific for the system.

Hacking Migrate from exFAT to FAT32.

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