Hacking Question SX OS: Switch won't turn on after crash. Battery and dongle charged, still nothing.

[marveldragon]

Just from combing through posts an overwhelmingly amount of reports about corruption is associated with exfat.

I use exfat despite that even though I too have experienced corruption from system crashes just because I am too lazy to split my large files. Exfat users need to be aware of this and accept it. By the way if you are like me and use emuNand with exfat, a system crash has a 50-50 chance of corrupting your emuNand.

Just because the card “works” or you can read it on a PC when you plug it in does not mean the actual data in the files are not corrupted. Also things like emuNand and retroArch constantly writes to the card for caching and logging. If your system crashes during these operations, it messes with your file table leading to corruption.

As for why there is no sd card fixer, well you would only need the fixer once your card is messed up...most of the time when your card is messed up, you cannot boot your switch. So it sort of pointless. Also Nintendo exfat driver is a little proprietary. Since it does try and use things like journaling and other features that are not standard to the format. It would require someone to reverse engineering their driver which for most people, they don’t want to waste their time doing pointless work if they have no strong feelings for. Most devs either accept the limitations of exfat or just completely ignore the format for the more stable fat32.

 

[linuxares]

Reason why exfat is more prone to corruption on the Switch is because Nintendos shitty exfat drivers.

 

[cloudfe]

I seem to understand there are conflicted opinions over the stability of the Exfat format.
I'm ok to switching to fat32 if this could improve my chances to avoid other crashes. But would I be able to simply copy/paste the content of the sd, or would I need to reinstall everything once again?

 

[marveldragon]

I seem to understand there are conflicted opinions over the stability of the Exfat format.
I'm ok to switching to fat32 if this could improve my chances to avoid other crashes. But would I be able to simply copy/paste the content of the sd, or would I need to reinstall everything once again?

You could copy over most of the content from your exfat card to a fat32. You will however not be able to copy your files over 3.5GBs, you will need to split them. You MAY also have trouble copying your Nintendo or Emutendo(emuNand Nintendo folder) so you will have to reinstall your nsp’s.

 

[cloudfe]

So, I've tried formatting in fat32 and copying everything, but the Switch started dismounting the sd at boot (several times in a row), while SX OS kept finding the sd.

I've researched the issue in the forum, and it seems to be related to something Mac OS adds in the process when formatting the sd card (something "archive bit").
I did use the Mac OS pre-installed utility for formatting the first time. So I've tried the SD Formatter utility in later tries to see if I could avoid the problem. Nothing. I even went back to Exfat to see if Fat32 was the problem. Still nothing.

I then searched for a manual (i.e. "Terminal"/"CMD") solution, but I couldn't make it work.
Thank God I've noticed that a recent release of Hekate/CTCaer mod added a fix for this exact problem. And Hekate did find a bunch of stuff that needed to be fixed. Lo and behold, the sd card (with everything copied over) worked as if nothing ever happened

I am now on Exfat, no Emunand (never installed it in the first place), and everything seems to work. I'll wait a while before trying to reinstall Retroarch – I still have a huge backlog anyway.

P.S.
I've tried running a check disk in windows command prompt (chkdsk x: /F) like Captain_N suggested, and everything seems fine

 

[M7L7NK7]

I was in the exfat is fine boat for months too and scoffed at everyone who had problems, and it got me eventually