Ubuntu

How to Format an SD Card in Gutsy?

Asked by coljohnhannibalsmith

I've recently installed Gusty on an Acer 5102 Laptop and am very satisfied with the many things Ubuntu does well; though I might wish the installation headaches on my enemies.

I have an internal "ENE 5-in-1 Memory Card Reader," which would not work in Feisty; but much to my surprise does work in Gutsy. What seems to be missing, that is available in Windows is the option to Format the SD Card with a File System. In Windows I had the option of formatting the SD Card in FAT16, FAT32 or NTFS. All I had to do to activate this feature was to Right-Click on the SD Card drive icon, then select Format from the Drop-Down-Menu. This action would launch a format tool from which I could select the file system I wanted to use. I assume Gusty has a similar feature; but I'm unsure about how to access it. It might be a generic format command; such as "fdisk," or it might be a specialized tool for this type of media. I've searched the online documentation and Google; but haven't been able to find anything that specifically addresses formatting SD Cards.

Does anyone know the answer?

Thanks, John

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wub (wub) said : 		#1

What is called 'formatting a disk' in Windows/DOS is called 'making a file system' in Linux/Unix. My Feisty system has mkdosfs (for: 'make dos file system') installed on it, and this command-line tool will create an msdos file system on a device. I never tried to do this to an SD card, but as long as you can tell mkdosfs where the card is located, it should be able to take it from there. I think most of the cards I've seen are FAT16? That would be "mkdosfs -F 16 /dev/name" where -F 16 means "use 16-bit file allocation table".

If you planning to use this card in a camera or other device that might make assumptions about what the format will be, you can choose 12, 16 or 32 bit file allocation table(s) with mkdosfs. It is very likely that there are better ways to do this, but I do not know them.

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coljohnhannibalsmith (john-wakefield2) said : 		#2

Thank you sir. I understand now.

-John

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Jonny McCullagh (jonny-mccullagh) said : 		#3

For readers who want to use a GUI it is also possible to format SD cards using GParted, which when installed (via Synaptic) is available from System > Administration > Partition Editor

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abePdIta (abepdita) said : 		#4

[Sorry for my English mistakes]
Thank you very much guys for your answers.. but I've got a problem: I've a new SD card inserted in my internal reader and I can't find nothing related to my SD in /dev/*.. what can I do? Please note that another SD card is mounted automatically when I put it in..

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abePdIta (abepdita) said : 		#5

Ah, founded another info.. dmesg return "mmc1: error -84 whilst initialising SD card".. google doesn't help me with this..

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abePdIta (abepdita) said : 		#6

Ok, never mind, it seems to be a too-old-reader problem; founded somewhere that some internal readers don't support > 1GB sized cards; Window_sVista recognize the card incorrectly too.

Sorry for the mistake, ciao!

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Suresh Kalidasan (beagleboard-org) said : 		#7

Hi,

I need to Set the Geometry of the SD Card to use this for Beagle Board.

I reached expert mode by "fdisk /dev/mmcblk0" then

Command (m for help): [x]

Here i was searching for changing my number of heads, number of sectors. By default i found i need to use 'h' to change no. of head, it seems in Ubuntu it is different. I am not able to find the same, can some body help me.

Thanks,
Suresh K