[Wylug-discuss] SD Card Formatting

[Paul Brook]

> Hello. I'm failing to format an SD card. Anybody got any suggestions of
> what to try?
>
> Photos saved to the card were frequently being corrupted:

You've missed an obvious cuprit: the PC card reader.

Either way, I wouldn't waste much effort trying to "fix" it.  Both cards and 
readers are cheap.  I strongly recommend you take advantage of this and swap 
in replacements to confirm whether they are faulty.

Most likely candidate is the card.  You don't say how old it is, but many SD 
cards are poor quality, and wear out extremely quickly.  Unlike magnetic media 
which can [sometimes] be revived by a format, for flash the opposite is true.  
Once they start to wear out they're only going to get worse.

Even if it's some incompatibility between the card and camera or reader, 
messing with the filesystem/partitioning isn't likely to help.  If fact it's 
likely to do more harm that good as cards are often sensitive to the 
filesystem layout.  They often come with a slightly unusual layout that 
happens to match the internal flash layout/controller heuristics.

>   $ sudo mkfs -t vfat /dev/mmcblk0

That's the whole device, not the partition.

Paul