SD card formatting details

[lazzarello]

I lost my SD card which could boot the firmware and load modules. I built this repo from source and used the install.sh script to copy the files to an SD card formated as FAT32. When I inserted the card into the Aleph and held the mode switch to enter bootloader mode, the message on the screen says "SD card not found".

I formatted the card on an Arch Linux computer using fdisk. I tried both a partition and no partition on the block device. Neither would be recognized as an SD card by the Aleph.

Halp?

[catfact]

this has been a consistent pain - not all sdcards are created equal (they are typically little mcricontrollers running their own arcane firmware) and the PDCA controller on the atmel just doesn't seem to get along with some.

so the obnoxious answer is to try other models / brands of sdcard...

also get the smallest you can find, preferably <4gb, since the way some firmwares map fat32 sectors to bigger disks seems to be issue-prone.

[lazzarello]

Yikes, okay. I have a 16GB. The small ones are quite rare. I'll hack on it again when I get back to the device and update this ticket here with results.