[BeuwolfAgate]

Maybe this would help...

I have a 4gb miniSD (Q Memory) card. I will list the things I have tried and had problems with... Hope it helps somebody. I have a SD card reader built into my laptop...

1. Formatted the card in the PPC itself, it won't read on the PC. The PC just kept saying it is not formatted.

2. Formatted the card in the PC using the regular right-click-drive-format functionality. It worked in the PPC for an hour or so. And when the PPC woke up it said the card is not formatted. Lost a lot of programs.

3. Used WM5Storage, connected the PPC to USB. It won't initially show up in the list of drives (My Computer). So, you have to go into disk management and the do partitions and formats. Right click on My Computer and click on Manage. Then on the left section of the manage window, click on disk management. After it reads, you should see a disk on the right bottom panel, which would say non partitioned. Also, the SD card should show up as a USB mass storage device. (WM5Stor.. something).
---Rest of the methods I tried only through this...
(a) Do a quick format FAT32 with default allocation. Same as 2, worked for sometime and then when device woke up, it said not formatted.

(b) Do a full format FAT32/def. alloc. same results as (a)

(c) Partition the disk into two "Primary Partitions", one with 1.85 GB and the next with 2 GB. To do this, right click on the disk (we are still the management console, remember!), and click New Partition, and select primary and mentioned size as roughly 1.85 gb and then format with FAT32/def. alloc. (quick or not doesnt matter), and did the same with second partition. Worked for a couple of hours, and after that the SD card got erased. The programs didn't show up after the device woke up. This time it didn't say SD not formatted. Instead programs stopped working. Went to the card and it had many of the files missing. After that programs refused to install. (Mind You, once you partition, the SD card is not readable by the built in SD reader on the PC. Now, I don't have a USB SD reader, and so I can't test it that way.)

(d) Did same as (c), except did FAT16/def. alloc. and still same errors as (c).

(e) THIS HAS BEEN WORKING FOR A DAY NOW. Did the whole partition routine, BUT did FAT16 with 32K clusters allocation, AND the size of the partitions is 1.95 GB each (I didn't want to get too close to 2 GB size as that craps out). Now, the device read the card properly and is able to use it properly. So far, I haven't lost files in it, nor did it ask me to reformat.

So, try (e) and see if that helps. NOW, the only way to read the card is through WM5Storage, so if you have programs that are installed in the card that run in the background, WM5Storage will refuse to lock it, so do a soft reset before you use the storage card or use a safe mode restart utility.

-AR

PS: I will keep posted on how the card is behaving with this method.