Anyone know a way to format an SD card from MxFFS to FAT?

[Dan123456]

Hey all 

I have just been doing a bit of an electronic storage clean up and have come across 3 X 4GB SD cards that I pulled out of some old security cameras and they are all using the MxFFS format (which appears to be a proprietary format from some quick googling).

When I plug it into my computer it says they only have a 16MB capacity, and it stays that way even in the format options (AKA I do have the option to format them to FAT through windows, but they would stay as 16MB cards which wouldn’t be great )

Do any of you guys know a way to format them to FAT or NTFS and bring them back to their 4GB capacity?

I imagine there probably is some software I could use to do this as I have a vague memory of using a program to do something similar many years ago (probably to use a standard USB in gaming consoles or something like that) but figured I’d ask you all for any pointers before I start randomly downloading all kinds of crap

No stress if the answer is just a flat “Nope, can’t be done” as 4GB SD cards aren’t exactly expensive these days  Just figured I’d give it a shot as they could be useful to have around for Arduino projects 

Thanks so much for your time in advance all 

[retiredfeline]

It could be reporting the capacity of the first partition. You should fire up a disk formatter program and examine the partitions on it.

[Dan123456]

It could be reporting the capacity of the first partition. You should fire up a disk formatter program and examine the partitions on it.

Thank you 

Any recommendations for a good disk formatter program these days?

[retiredfeline]

Any OS should come with its own.

[magic]

Google how to list, remove or add partitions on Windows. AFAIK there are utilities bundled with the OS.

On Linux I would know if the cards are in at least semi-working condition and have them formatted to any FS I want in minutes...

[Dan123456]

Yeah na, windows standard one is poo (and I am pretty sure that is why I used a third party one back in the day)

I just gave it a go for shits and giggles and I could delete the “hidden” 3.68GB partition but won’t let me extend the other volume so now just have a 16MB partition and 3.86 GB of unallocatable space that I can’t do anything with 

All good  I’ll do so googling and try and find a good third part one these days 

Figured I’d just ask here first incase you all had any recommendations to save me installing and uninstalling 15 different useless programs or that stupid paid software that doesn’t tell you it’s paid until after you’ve installed it type crap (google is so, so broken when looking for free software these days as always just gives you pages upon pages of sponsored crap) 

[IanB]

If you don't need to keep any existing data on the card, you can just do a clean format from scratch. Then you should be able to get the full capacity with any file system you wish (e.g. FAT32). Don't mess around trying to delete or extend existing partitions, just wipe it clean and start over.

I'm not sure why the Windows disk management utility can't do it for you?

[Lindley]

Have you tried GParted on a usb stick ?

https://gparted.org/

[IanB]

It's an SD card, for heaven's sake. You just format the things. It's not rocket science.

[retiredfeline]

Just wipe all partitions and create a single one. People who extend partitions want to preserve existing data. That's not you.

[rsjsouza]

The HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool is the simplest tool that completely wipes and re-builds the partition to a single one:

https://download.cnet.com/hp-usb-disk-storage-format-tool/3000-2094_4-10974082.html

A bit more complex is Rufus, which also allows writing disk images to it.
https://rufus.ie/en/

I have been using both a very long time and they work very well.

[Dan123456]

Awesome thanks so much all!

It's an SD card, for heaven's sake. You just format the things. It's not rocket science.

Usually, I’d absolutely agree with you!

However, I remember the windows tool having issues in the past with weird formats which seems to be a similar situation here (although I think that was more partitions windows could not see back then - but this was years ago so can’t remember exactly).

I can’t delete or modify the 16MB partition and cannot do anything with the other partition (all the options are greyed out!) and can not see any option to “factory wipe” the card and just start over.

That said, I very well could be doing something wrong  I just remember needing to use third party software for funky formats / partitions back in the day and am assuming this is one of those cases 

Edit: oh and oh formatting, if I try it only formats the 16MB partition. It will not let me format the 3.86 partition (even before I deleted it) 

[DavidAlfa]

Wipe all partitions and create a new one.
In Windows, execute diskpart in a cmd window.

list disk, find the SD number
sel disk n, where n is the previous number
clean
create part pri
format fs=FAT32 quick
assign

Done!

[Stray Electron]

Yeah na, windows standard one is poo

I just gave it a go for shits and giggles and I could delete the “hidden” 3.68GB partition but won’t let me extend the other volume so now just have a 16MB partition and 3.86 GB of unallocatable space that I can’t do anything with 



Figured I’d just ask here first incase you all had any recommendations to save me installing and uninstalling 15 different useless programs

    I think the OP's problem here is that he doesn't want to delete his 16Mb DOS/Windows partition and lose his already installed programs. But in order to reformat the card under DOS or Windows, he's going to have to delete all of the partitions before he can re-partition the card as one big single partition.

   I don't know of any program that can re-partition a drive without losing the data within a partition.  But you might be able to save the data to a 2nd drive using Ghost or something like that and then reinstall it to the new larger partition after re-partitioning. Even Copy or Xcopy or PKzip should be able to do that and preserve the path names and also copy all of the hidden files.

  You might want to experiment with copying your data to a 2nd drive and then try restoring it to a 3rd scratch drive to see how that works (Before re-partitioning your original drive.)

[wraper]

Yeah na, windows standard one is poo (and I am pretty sure that is why I used a third party one back in the day)

I just gave it a go for shits and giggles and I could delete the “hidden” 3.68GB partition but won’t let me extend the other volume so now just have a 16MB partition and 3.86 GB of unallocatable space that I can’t do anything with 

PEBKAC. Why in hell you need to extend any partition? Delete all partitions and create a new one taking a whole memory card size. Or use diskpart to delete partition table completely and create new from scratch.

[DavidAlfa]

Windows only uses the first partition of removable drives.
So you might partition a 16GB SD/USB stick into two 8GB partitions, windows will only show the first one.
Some stupid limitation I can't remember were it came from.
I think it only applies to MBR systems, not GPT.

Fat partitions can't be extended using Windows, but other programs will do.
Unless you want to keep the partition for some reason, just wipe them using the previous instructions.

[Dan123456]

Yeah na, windows standard one is poo

I just gave it a go for shits and giggles and I could delete the “hidden” 3.68GB partition but won’t let me extend the other volume so now just have a 16MB partition and 3.86 GB of unallocatable space that I can’t do anything with 



Figured I’d just ask here first incase you all had any recommendations to save me installing and uninstalling 15 different useless programs

    I think the OP's problem here is that he doesn't want to delete his 16Mb DOS/Windows partition and lose his already installed programs. But in order to reformat the card under DOS or Windows, he's going to have to delete all of the partitions before he can re-partition the card as one big single partition.

   I don't know of any program that can re-partition a drive without losing the data within a partition.  But you might be able to save the data to a 2nd drive using Ghost or something like that and then reinstall it to the new larger partition after re-partitioning. Even Copy or Xcopy or PKzip should be able to do that and preserve the path names and also copy all of the hidden files.

  You might want to experiment with copying your data to a 2nd drive and then try restoring it to a 3rd scratch drive to see how that works (Before re-partitioning your original drive.)

Na, I’m happy to loose any and all data on there 

The Windows tool just doesn’t seem to let me delete the 16MB partition or combine the 2 or allow me to delete everything and start over! The only option that isn’t greyed out is format and that won’t let me format the whole card into one part (selecting it only formats the 16MB partition)!

That said, it is always possible I am just doing something wrong 

It’s 1:45 am here now but will take some screenshots in the morning to show what I mean and will try some of the options people have suggested tomorrow 

[Ian.M]

David's suggestion to use diskpart will work (unless the card is fake/bad), but diskpart is deeply unfriendly and you could be one mistyped keystroke away from erasing your system drive, or another fixed drive.  If you do choose to use it, after the sel command, do detail disk and carefully examine the results to confirm the selected disk is actually the SD card!

My first choice would be to try the official SD association formatter utility, and only dive into partition utilities if it fails.

[DavidAlfa]

Unless you have other 4GB drives... Just check it out carefully.
Once I wiped a 2TB hdd because I accidentally choose the drive showing 1900GB instead 1900MB!

[magic]

My first choice would be to try the official SD association formatter utility, and only dive into partition utilities if it fails.

This is a good idea too, if such a thing exists and if it can do what you need it to do.

SD cards are specified to work best if the data partition and the user data area of the filesystem (FAT32 for 4GB) are particularly aligned. Standard OS tools are clueless about it (or did they become better recently?), although I must say that I have never had any serious problems due to the use of computer formatted cards. The worst that happened was one Panasonic camera which complained on every power-on that the card "can't be used for recording and should be formatted", but it still worked normally.

BTW, are they SD or SDHC cards? Both existed...

[Peabody]

Well, if you're going to use the cards for Arduino projects, then chances are you have an Arduino or two laying around.  If you also have an SD card module, you could use the SdFormatter.ino example in the Arduino SdFat.h library to completely erase and format the cards.  I can't guarantee it would look past all the existing partitions and do that, but I suspect it would.

That method has the advantage that it leaves almost all the card in the erased state, which means it won't need to be erased before writing to it.  I don't think anything running in Windows can do that.

It's also possible some other camera would do it.  A camera which offers a "low level" format option will also erase the card.

[magic]

RTS5129, RTS5139, RTS5179, RTS5170 are Realtek USB chips which expose low level SD interface to the host (not USB Mass Storage). There used to be similar PCI chips and I believe some x86 laptop SoCs also have native SD/SDIO controllers. I don't know if their Windows drivers expose trim functionality to the OS, but it works on Linux.

[Halcyon]

The HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool is the simplest tool that completely wipes and re-builds the partition to a single one

+1

Very handy utility that I've used a few times when Windows becomes stubborn. Does what it says on the tin.

[Veteran68]

My first choice would be to try the official SD association formatter utility, and only dive into partition utilities if it fails.

^^^ This. It's what I've always used to "recover" stubbornly formatted SD cards.

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/

[Dan123456]

As promised, here are some screen shots of what I am talking about with the Windows tool not letting me do stuff 

The options for the 16MB partition were the same before formatting it too 

Will give the options you guys suggested a go now 

Really appreciate all your help!

[Dan123456]

Thank you so much rsjsouza and Halcyon 

The HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool works perfectly 

I am sure a bunch of the other options that you guys recommended would have worked great too  That just happened to be the first one I tried 

Thank you all so, so much once again!