SD Card only fills halfway

[Andy Jack]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 07:01:14AM -0500, William O'Higgins wrote:
> The card has never shown full capacity.  I hope it's not half dead -
> that would be tiresome.
> 
> There was one other suggestion - that there are too many files in the
> top level directory - well, I doubt it, because there are 147.  Thanks
> though.

I experienced somewhat similar behaviour with a CF card - it would
regularly lock up my (cheapo) MP3 player mysteriously.  Turned out there
was a bad block or two that was fixed with the following command:

mkdosfs -F 32 -c /dev/whatever

"-c" checks for bad blocks.  "-F 32" specifies FAT32.  mkdosfs is, as
you might guess, a FAT formatter for *nix.  IIRC, formatting under
WinXP couldn't rectify the problem.

The man page for mkdosfs states that the default number of root entries
is 112 or 224 for floppies and 512 for hard disks (although that could
be mkdosfs-specific).  mkdosfs does have an option to change this
number.

Possibly, there's a little bit in the middle that's dead?  If, by
reformatting with bad block checking, you cause the new FAT table to
ignore this part, you might be able to recover most of the space.

Good luck,
Andy
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