2GB SD/MiniSD appear as 1GB

john-woods · 05-02-2006, 03:40 PM

Hey guys,

I recently bought a 2GB SD card and a 2GB MiniSD card for my camera and phone. When I inserted them in my card reader they both appeared to be pre-formatted as FAT16 and were only 1GB in size. I tried re-formatting them, assuming FAT16 to be the cause of the size limitation, using Disk Utility.app in the hope that the missing space would reappear but it didn't.

Using this article http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...30613121738812 for reference I tried using several of the commands listed in there.

It appears as though there are two partitions ("ls /dev/rdisk2*" returns disk2s1 and disk2s2). I am unable to reformat the first partition with error "permission denied" even though I am logged in as root (using either of the following commands; "newfs_hfs -v HFS_VOLUME_NAME /dev/rdisk2s1" or "newfs_msdos -v FAT_VOLUME_NAME -F 32 /dev/rdisk2s1")

Is there any way to force the terminal to simply re-format the cards as a single 2GB FAT32 partition? Or even a way to make my Mac see the full drive size and mount it properly?

Many thanks
John

P.S. If it is of any use; my Mac is a 17" PowerBook G4 running OS X v10.4.6, the card reader being used is a SanDisk 6 in 1 PCMCIA card, the two memory cards are made by SanDisk and A-Data respectively.

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05-02-2006, 03:40 PM	#1
john-woods Prospect Join Date: May 2006 Posts: 5	Hey guys, I recently bought a 2GB SD card and a 2GB MiniSD card for my camera and phone. When I inserted them in my card reader they both appeared to be pre-formatted as FAT16 and were only 1GB in size. I tried re-formatting them, assuming FAT16 to be the cause of the size limitation, using Disk Utility.app in the hope that the missing space would reappear but it didn't. Using this article http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...30613121738812 for reference I tried using several of the commands listed in there. It appears as though there are two partitions ("ls /dev/rdisk2*" returns disk2s1 and disk2s2). I am unable to reformat the first partition with error "permission denied" even though I am logged in as root (using either of the following commands; "newfs_hfs -v HFS_VOLUME_NAME /dev/rdisk2s1" or "newfs_msdos -v FAT_VOLUME_NAME -F 32 /dev/rdisk2s1") Is there any way to force the terminal to simply re-format the cards as a single 2GB FAT32 partition? Or even a way to make my Mac see the full drive size and mount it properly? Many thanks John P.S. If it is of any use; my Mac is a 17" PowerBook G4 running OS X v10.4.6, the card reader being used is a SanDisk 6 in 1 PCMCIA card, the two memory cards are made by SanDisk and A-Data respectively.