Root Problems with Clockwork and 32gb MicroSD card

[sik00]

Thanks Bionic. I actually did not format them right off the bat. Like you, I just inserted and thought it would work. But it didn't, and the phone said to format it. So I did -- at least on the first two, using both the formatter program from sdcard.org and the phone. On this last card, though, I decided its not the disk, so I haven't even tried to reformat it.

Did not format mine either, slapped that puppy in straight out of the box, booted into cwm, tried a backup, and it hung at system backup. Seems to hang at the same spot every time. It gets through the boot.img backup, then freezes at system. I can do backups without any problems on the 2 GB.
I just tried it a few minutes ago for laughs. Booted into cwm and tried a backup. Told me there was an error with reading the sdcard. Then, without rebooting, I tried formatting in cwm and it said format complete. Okay. So I try backup again, and it froze at the same spot, backing up system. Pulled the battery, booted normally, and my Settings > Storage shows it mounted and working. Exploring the sdcard root folder showed me that the formatting was successful in cwm, because I had brand new folders with time stamps dated a few minutes earlier. Tried taking a picture, also a video, they both saved to the sdcard and playback just fine. The card just doesn't want to play nice with cwm.
Strange how your 32gb shows the same symptoms as my 16gb, yet your 16gb works, and mine doesn't.

 

[Bionic Chronic]

But just curious what makes the phone not support anything higher then 32gb?

64GB (UltraMicro SD's) are new and use the SDXD Format instead of SD or SDHC. Most phones are currently only compatible with SD and SDHC Formats.
Formatted with MBR Partition/Max Capacity:
SD (or SDSC) Card: FAT16 / 1MB-2GB w/ some 4GB available.
SDHC Card: FAT32 / 4GB - 32GB
NEW- SDXD: exFAT / 32GB - 2TB

So as you can see, most devices were using the most universal option of the FAT16 and FAT32 systems. So using a SDXC with an exFAT format would not register with most devices. As newer phones come out and the Extended Capacity (SDXC) SD's are being more popular, we may see a switch. At this time though, most are not capable of using higher than 32GB.
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[icekream]

So if newer phones were only in sdxc we would have to get newer SD cards as well?

 

[Bionic Chronic]

So if newer phones were only in sdxc we would have to get newer SD cards as well?

I believe you could format the older cards to use MBR Partition exFAT. Then they would be readable.

Here are a couple sites that may help clarify some things.

How To Choose an SD Card for Best Performance and Compatibility
or
Secure Digital (SD) - Wiki

 

[ndno]

mbwd, if you have access to a Linux machine (like Ubuntu or Fedora), here is what you can try. I have always found it the most reliable to format a SD card (microSD), especially one that is greater than 2GB (SDHC in other words), under a Linux machine using fdisk. It's not for the faint of heart and does require you to know some Linux commands. I don't think there is such a utility under Windows and the built-in format application under Windows doesn't properly format most SDHC cards that are good for use on Android smartphones. Here's how I got my 16GB microSD card to format and work with my LG Marquee.


1. Get a USB reader and insert your microSD in it
2. Plug it into your Linux box (the commands below assume you're operating as root, i.e. using su to chang to root or precede the command with "sudo")
3. Under a shell, you can enter dmesg to see which device corresponds to the inserted microSD, in the case below in which I have a 4GB microSD, it's /dev/sdd

hub 1-2:1.0: 7 ports detected
Vendor: USB 2.0 Model: SD MMC Reader Rev:
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00
SCSI device sdd: 7745536 512-byte hdwr sectors (3966 MB)
sdd: Write Protect is off
sdd: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sdd: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sdd: 7745536 512-byte hdwr sectors (3966 MB)
sdd: Write Protect is off
sdd: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sdd: assuming drive cache: write through
sdd: sdd1
sd 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sdd

4. Launch fdisk with the specified device: fdisk /dev/sdd
5. Enter d to delete the existing partition, if any
6. Enter n to create a partition
7. Enter p to choose primary
8. Enter 1 to as partition number
9. Just press enter twice (first and last cylinder) to see max space for partition
10. Enter t to change the file system type for the newly created partition
11. Enter L to list the partition types; enter the code that says "W95 FAT32 (LBA)", in my case, it's c
12. Enter w to save the new partition created and exit
13. Now format the newly created partition, enter mkfs.vfat /dev/sdd1
14. That's it, you should be able to use the microSD with your LG phone; Windows will be able to see it as a FAT32 partition too

This works great for my 16GB microSD card on my LG Marquee

If the above procedures still don't get your card properly working under CWM, you may have do advanced partitioning under fdisk, in which case, you force the partition to configured as 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, and whatever # of cylinders to fill up the capacity of your card; Linux and Android devices, in general, like those disk geometry values; here's a link for a dual partition but you can just do the 1st partition to fill up the full card and ignore the Linux partition: http://code.google.com/p/beagleboard/wiki/LinuxBootDiskFormat

 

[mbwd]

Thanks for the Linux suggestion. But I don't have a Linux machine, except that a Mac is Unix-based. Any idea if these commands work on a Mac through terminal?

 

[ndno]

Thanks for the Linux suggestion. But I don't have a Linux machine, except that a Mac is Linux-based. Any idea if these commands work on a Mac through terminal?

I believe the Mac OSX is based off the BSD version of Unix, the parent of Linux. So they are somewhat similar. So you should be able to launch a shell under your MAC and follow the procedures, assuming fdisk is available. Here's some more info on using the shell under a Mac: Using the shell (Terminal) in Mac OS X

 

[mbwd]

I'm still trying to translate Unix fdisk commands into Mac fdisk commands (unfortunately, they are not the same). So far, I have root access and have gotten the following table for the partitions (really only one):

localhost:~ root# fdisk /dev/disk3
Disk: /dev/disk3 geometry: 3880/255/63 [62333952 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
Starting Ending
#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1: 0C 0 130 3 - 1023 254 63 [ 8192 - 62325760] Win95 FAT32L
2: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

Will let you know if I get further. Would you mind posting a table like the above for the correct settings so I know what it should look like?

 

[ndno]

I'm still trying to translate Unix fdisk commands into Mac fdisk commands (unfortunately, they are not the same). So far, I have root access and have gotten the following table for the partitions (really only one):

localhost:~ root# fdisk /dev/disk3
Disk: /dev/disk3 geometry: 3880/255/63 [62333952 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
Starting Ending
#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1: 0C 0 130 3 - 1023 254 63 [ 8192 - 62325760] Win95 FAT32L
2: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

Will let you know if I get further. Would you mind posting a table like the above for the correct settings so I know what it should look like?

Here's my 16GB microSD geometry from fdisk:

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdd: 16.0 GB, 16039018496 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1949 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 1 1950 15659008 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

Sorry I don't know much about the fdisk version under the MAC. Make sure you're accessing the correct drive device; if you access your hard drive device by mistake, you'll kill your MAC.

Just do a simple partition creation and set the type to W95 FAT32 (LBA); don't attempt to do anything special; it looks like your configuration is correct, though the head value is 254 instead of 255 (like mine). Just format it afterwards with mkfs.vfat