Biggest Micro SD Card For Sansa E200 V1?

[steelgtr]

I can't believe I'm actually using a 4gb card, thanks to RB! How big and what type (hc?) limitations does this player have?

Rock on Rockbox!


bob

[saratoga]

At least 32GB, 64GB  (when available) will probably work if they're the backwards compatible SDXC type. 

[steelgtr]

At least 32GB, 64GB  (when available) will probably work if they're the backwards compatible SDXC type. 

Thanks for the quick reply!

Just to be clear, which type won't work?  Will all SDHC work?

Thanks again,


bob

[Chronon]

Yes, SDHC should be fine.

[bobbydriver]

32GB works fine in Rockbox

Not tried it with the original sansa firmware though

[mc2739]

No sdhc cards work with the original firmware, but they are supported with Rockbox.

[Grospoliner]

Not to thread jack someone else, but I just installed Rockbox on my E200 V1 and stuck an 8gig SDHC into the slot but the firmware doesn't seem to be reading it.

[saratoga]

I'd check that the card works on other devices.

[Grospoliner]

It does work in other devices. It doesn't always read when I plug the e200 in, with the card in the e200.

[saratoga]

Then there's probably not anything you can do.

[e280_refurb]

I had this problem as well. A 16GB microSDHC card from my cell phone worked fine in my e280, but a 4GB card did not. Here is how I got the 4GB card to work, (using Windows 7).

**NOTE: This procedure wipes all the data from the selected disk, so proceed with caution! If you select the wrong disk during this procedure you will wipe the wrong disk!

First use a card reader of some kind to plug the microSDHC card into your computer and make sure it shows up in Explorer. Note the size of the disk as displayed by Explorer. Note that I did NOT do this using the card plugged into the Sansa player and I don't know if that will work.

1. In Windows 7, Open a command prompt with administrator privileges.

2. Type "Diskpart" (without the quotes) and press "Enter"

3. At the Diskpart> prompt type "List Disk" and then press "Enter"

4. From the displayed list of all disks on the computer, determine the disk number of your microSDHC card. Again, determining the correct disk number is CRITICAL.

5. Type "Select Disk X" (where X is the number of your card) then press "Enter"
    The message "Disk X is now the selected disk." should appear

6. Type "Clean" then press "Enter"
   Assuming the message appears that "DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk", proceed

7. Type "Create partition primary" then press "Enter"
   Assuming the message appears that "DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition.", proceed

8. Type "Format" then press "Enter"

Depending on the size of the disk, the format should be FAT32 by default, and it will take several minutes to complete.

When the message appears that "DiskPart successfully formatted the volume.", proceed

9. Type "exit", then press enter.

Now you can eject the card from the computer and try it in the Sansa player.

If my directions are unclear, there is help built into the diskpart utility. Simply type "?" at the Diskpart> prompt to get a list of commands, and type (for example) "HELP FORMAT" to learn more. You can also google to find more info on DiskPart.

Hope this helps others who are experiencing this issue.

[bobbydriver]

I wanted to update this post to say that I have a Sansa 64gb MicroSD working fine and reliably in my E200v1

The challenge is that you have to format the card as FAT32 and the way to do that is not so easy. I ended up using EaseUS Partition Master 9.1 freeware tool.

It may have been an issue with the hardware or just a vagary of formatting an oversize file system as FAT32 (remember FAT32 should only work on 32gb) but the first MicroSD card I got, I managed to brick quite quickly. The original format to FAT32 threw some errors and I started again – the software tries to fix the errors and soon enough the card was unusable. Couldn't even format to NTFS.

I sent it back as faulty and was sent a replacement. I checked with Sansa support and they confirmed from the serial number that it was a genuine product (a lot of fakes on the market). However I took the precaution of doing a Windows chkdsk on the card before formatting – it picked up a few bad sectors so I got it to mark them as bad before I formatted to FAT32

This time the format worked perfectly and I could see in disk manager that the software had marked the first and last 16mb of the card as bad. This still left me with a healthy 60gb FAT32 partition on the MicroSD card and it's been happily working away on my rockboxed E200v1 ever since!

Happy days!

[scharkalvin]

It should be possible to format the card under Linux to fat32.  The command here is mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/xxx where xxx is the disk, usually something like sdc, sdd, or something like that.

[torne]

It may have been an issue with the hardware or just a vagary of formatting an oversize file system as FAT32 (remember FAT32 should only work on 32gb)

This is not actually true, FAT32 is specified to work up to 2TB with 512 byte sectors, or more if you use a larger sector size. The Windows formatting tools were intentionally limited by Microsoft in later versions of Windows to disallow it, is all (to encourage users to use NTFS or later, exFAT, instead).

[Notary Sojac]

I've formatted three 64gb micro cards with no problems.

(1) Make sure to use a reader or adapter that is SDXC aware.  The SDXC to SD adapter that comes with the SDXC card is always the best bet.

(2) Here's the free software that I found works best for FAT32 formatting in both WinXP and Win7 32 (other OS's I can't speak to)

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?guiformat.htm