Hardware how to perform factory reset on ez flash 4 ?

[oodhfshdfbs]

so I dug out my gba and had bit of a blast playing some old carts. found my ez flash 4 and thought about trying out this again, find some more interesting gba games. I have a folder full of working roms for the gba that i have used for pc emulators. put the ez flash 4 in, switched on ,got an error inside the main menu. decided to format the card and try to start over again. followed this tutorial;

https://gbatemp.net/threads/a-noobs-guide-to-ez-flash-iv-2015-release.412339/

got as far as turning it on with the formated card inserted in to the cart. hold down r, nothing, just boots back into the main menu and still getting errors. anyway to flash the cart to be factory reset. I don't like the menu much either. i'd like to start from scratch. googled and couldn't find much in the way of information on this....

can this be done? these were the errors I received;

warning
fat file system error

error
sector 0 data 0

 

[FAST6191]

I understand the thought process of wanting to go from scratch but most hacking devices and hacked devices are not really geared for that and you are usually better off debugging your issue.

That looks like an SD card issue more than anything else so if you can clean the SD card slot then do so -- electrical contact cleaner (not the automotive stuff as that is way too aggressive) is good stuff but a bit of tape on the back on the back of the card and insert and remove a whole bunch of times is also a good plan. If this is a miniSD card and you are using a microSD to miniSD adapter then go find a miniSD -- I don't know why those adapters are so awful (I have 10+ year old micro to full SD adapters working just fine through loads of abuse) but they are. Also if you stuck in a 4 gig or higher card into it and it is an old firmware remember it is 2 gigs or less for the older firmwares.

After that you can go through the updating firmware dance if you want -- I don't know when you stopped with the EZ4 but depending upon when that was we since got SDHC support and cart side patching (no more EZ4client if you don't want). I don't know that I would upgrade for a miniSD version (EZ4client never really bothered me and it is not like you will suddenly be playing new games you could not before, you also have the downside of sometimes old school SD class devices don't always play nicely with the SDHC compatible firmwares and said adapters are terrible) but you do you on that one.

 

[oodhfshdfbs]

yea its a mini sd micro adapter, unsure what brand but the actual micro sd is a sandisk 2gb. I will try and get a mini sd and try with that.

it was a long time ago I set this up, how would I check the firmware version? perhaps best thing to try is one mini card under 4gb and one over, so I can try different firmware versions?
edit; wow mini sd cards are expensive, I guess they are rare now? not sure I wanna part with as much cash as ebay is asking for reputable brands with higher capacity. hmmm.

 

[FAST6191]

Haven't checked miniSD prices of late but I can see it -- a lot of 2 gig and smaller plain SD/microSD seem to go for a lot because they are useful in legacy devices that never made the jump, or certain types of electronics project.
We used to be able to say go find somewhere dealing in old mobile phones and see what goes there but that is probably a bit late for that. Likewise I have not seen any in charity shops, car boot sales or similar for a while and while you can never tell what will be in such things then there were reliable things for it.
As far as higher capacity then miniSD died off not too long after microSD came on the scene so you will be lucky to find much other than 512 and 1 gig cards. 2 gigs is the maximum that SD officially supports but there are some super rare 4 gig SD cards that are not SDHC, in minSD form factor is probably even rarer. I don't know what goes for SDHC class miniSD but it will likely be incredibly rare.

Anyway it is probably contact issues that are causing the problems here with the adapter. In that case it would make sense to lessen those. If you want to stick layers of thin tape to force better contact both between the adapter and the cart and the microSD and the adapter then that might sort it -- tape and paper frequently sort contact issues. Some might go a step further and make a small dent/divot inside the cart to force things but that is a bit more risky and tape works -- hopefully you are not pulling the card in and out all the time.

For DS games it would make a difference but for GBA games then anything that works other than the throwaway 64 meg things that came with old mobiles should do -- for GBA purposes you are copying to either the NOR or fast RAM first after all.