Hardware Partion A SD Card ?

[pasc]

Since the Play-Yan seemingly only supports 1 GB Cards and I only own 2 and 4 GB ones:

Is there any way to partition the card to only have 1 GB available (FAT 32) ?

Thanks in advance for answers.

 

[Arras]

I guess it doesn't support SDHC? Have you tried some of your 2GB cards? If they're not SDHC, they'll probably work anyway. But if that is the issue, I don't think you can do that. You can partition the card to only have 1GB available, but it probably won't help if SDHC is the issue.

 

[FAST6191]

Yeah there is, I recall having to do such a thing years ago for a few flash carts that had also not added 2 gig support (to be fair at the time 2 gig SD cards cost an absolute fortune). 4 gig is more likely than not to be SDHC so I doubt that will work.

I believe you can even do it in windows diskmgmt.msc but I do prefer gparted for this sort of thing.

 

[sandytf]

The type (SD/SDHC/SDXC) is part of the physical card and can't be changed by formatting.

 

[Fishaman P]

The type (SD/SDHC/SDXC) is part of the physical card and can't be changed by formatting.

If you really want to get technical, all cards are the plain SD type; SDHC and SDXC are just extensions to guarantee that the device can read a certain amount of storage. They all have the same hardware, it's just the software support that differentiates them.

That being said, I definitely think it's worth a shot to make a 1GB partition. Just make sure that's it's a little under 1GB, because it won't read it if the partition is 1.00001GB, which can frustratingly happen because of Windows being dumb with GB and GiB.

 

[sandytf]

There are small differences between SD and SDHC, however the electrical interface is the same. As a result, the differences between the card types do not require hardware modifications. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital#Storage_capacity_calculations for a description of the differences.

 

[pasc]

So I have to buy a 1Gigabyte one...

Alright, thanks.

 

[FAST6191]

So I have to buy a 1Gigabyte one...

Alright, thanks.

I am not sure what the other purpose the other posts were serving (nice discussion, largely irrelevant though I do have to note there were a few SD controllers rather than all software things but again that is a different discussion) but I have seen it be necessary to drop the partition size before for these older devices. I am not sure what would be changed to allow for 2 gigs rather than 1 but you certainly can repartition to allow it to work in some cases.

Still if it is just a SD/microSD with adapter then I do suggest old mobile phone shops or if people have an old mobile phone in a draw they can work.