[beagleboard] BeagleBone - microSD FAT format issue

The image is a copy of an 4GB SD card. Using an 8G card is really a waste of half a card. You must use FAT as the boot ROM has trouble reading FAT32 for booting. I see FAT in my format
tool. Use version 2.0.6. I need to check the later versions. If you can’t find it, send me direct email and I will send it to you.

It may be that the formatter tool, as old as it is, can’t format 8G. As I said, it is a waste anyway. I suggest you get a 4G card for this.

If your card is new, then you really don’t need to do the format step as indicated in the instructions. The imager tool will just write over it an in essence just reformat the card. You only need this to recreate a card that was done before, where the FAT partition is the only partition seen.

I suggest that you skip to the WindiskImager step and just do that one.

The instructions are written for a Windows machine and not linux.

Gerald

For what it's worth, the SD card is partitioned into a small FAT32
partition, and then a rest-of-disk linux partition.

For what it's worth this partitioning scheme is consistent with what
the linux shell script "mkcard.txt" would generate (see
http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/demo/beaglebone/ and in
particular the linux-only (sorry!) section "How to Unpack and Boot the
Demo Image - the hard way").

Here is what my 4GB card looks like (it was produced by copying the
~135M image file Angstrom-Cloud9-IDE-eglibc-ipk-v2012.01-core-
beaglebone-2012.01.27.img.xz onto the SD card, again, linux, sorry):

For waht it is worth, I have seen issues with FAT32 on BeagleBoard and BeagleBoard-xM. I have not seen it on the BeagleBone.

Gerald

Thank you Gerald and everyone for your help

-- FAT32 format using the Windows version of the HP formatter worked
great
-- I saw you updated the CircuitCo wiki page. It might be worth
mentioning that the HP format util seems to need "Run as
Administrator" at least in Windows 7

-- This build seems much better that 11/16 version, thank you for the
help updating
* Connects via USB at192.168.7.2 and via ethernet cable via router-
assigned statics IP address
* bone101 runs
* GateOne runs
* Cloud9 runs
* PuTTY connects

All seems as advertised! Now to try and understand how to program on
Cloud9 etc

Thanks everyone
Richard