SD Card Format ?

[Washac]

I have new smart card device for an older computer that requires the use
of a 2GB SD card formatted to FAT 16.

I know booting into Bootcamp would or should do the task but was wondering if
there was an easy way to do this under OSX ?

 

[Tomorrow]

Disk Utility?

 

[Weaselboy]

http://www.spotwise.com/2008/10/27/partition-usb-disk-with-fat16-on-mac-os-x/

You can do it using the "diskutil" command in Terminal. Read over this article to make sure you get the drive and options correct. The GUI Disk Utility only does FAT32.

 

[Washac]

http://www.spotwise.com/2008/10/27/partition-usb-disk-with-fat16-on-mac-os-x/

You can do it using the "diskutil" command in Terminal. Read over this article to make sure you get the drive and options correct. The GUI Disk Utility only does FAT32.

Thanks for that 🙂

 

[Rockadile]

Disk Utility?

Could I format a 64GB+ microSD card (exFAT) to FAT/FAT32 using disk utility? This is to use with a dash cam that is limited to 32GB and under.

 

[Weaselboy]

Could I format a 64GB+ microSD card (exFAT) to FAT/FAT32 using disk utility? This is to use with a dash cam that is limited to 32GB and under.

You can use Disk Utility to format to FAT32, but not the older FAT16. You would need to use the Terminal process I linked to format to FAT16.

 

[dwig]

You could give this a try, it's from the SD Association themselves:

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

there are both Mac and Win versions.

 

[Washac]

You could give this a try, it's from the SD Association themselves:

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

there are both Mac and Win versions.

tried that, It gives you no choices other than just to format the card/device.

 

[Rockadile]

You can use Disk Utility to format to FAT32, but not the older FAT16. You would need to use the Terminal process I linked to format to FAT16.

MS DOS FAT is FAT32, correct? I wanted to know if disk utility will even give me the FAT32 format option instead of only exFAT for 64GB+ cards.

 

[Weaselboy]

MS DOS FAT is FAT32, correct? I wanted to know if disk utility will even give me the FAT32 format option instead of only exFAT for 64GB+ cards.

Correct. MS-DOS in Disk Utility is FAT32.

 

[dwig]

tried that, It gives you no choices other than just to format the card/device.

Did you test the card after formatting it?

the SD Association's spec for SD (actually SDSC) cards is that those between 32mb and 2gb use FAT-16b format. SDHC use FAT-32 and SDXC use exFAT by default, though other formats are supported by some devices and OSs. I would expect the SD Assoc's formatter to use FAT-16b when it senses that the card is an SDSC card.