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If you are using a brand new SD card you shouldn't have to use the Format step at all, it should be ready to roll. The advantage of using the SD card formatter over Windows' built-in formatting is that the only option is to format it as FAT and it will only let you format an SD card so there are fewer ways for a N00b to go wrong with the NOOBS instructions. (rather than splitting the SD card into a FAT16 '/boot' partition and an EXT3 Linux '/' partition. The NOOBS instructions are just formatting the whole card to FAT16, and copying a FAT16 based distro onto it. On first boot you should have an option to resize the EXT3 partition to fill whatever space your SD card has left. You are just laying down the image onto the new disk, making it an exact copy of the developer's disk.
#Fat16 sd card formatter mac
Even with doing the above, I could not get the SDHC card to work in a SD only camera. Thats FAT16 and I think Disk utility uses FAT32 Its a bit rubbish, seeing as the Mac is so superior in most departments, a simple extra choice for formatting wouldnt go astray in Disk Utility, just for compatibility. Ended using a live cd for gparted and was able to get it to 2GB and FAT16. The Image files of all of the RPi distros contain a FAT16 partition and an EXT3 partition (versions of FAT and EXT might vary from distro to distro). I tried the cmd format command, and could get it to FAT16, but I had trouble setting a partition size. There are 12-, 16- and 32-bit versions of the FAT system.
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It chooses the best file system, FAT16/FAT32, the optimum cluster size, and aligns file system structures on the card's flash erase boundaries. For smaller cards, 16 - 64 MB, it use FAT16 instead of FAT12. This mode is a subset of the SD Memory Card protocol, designed to communicate with a SPI channel. File Allocation Table, or FAT, is a filing system used in computer memory systems and cards, such as those manufactured by SanDisk. For SD/SDHC cards larger than 64 MB this sketch attempts to match the format generated by the formatter. If you have used DD, this is basically the same process. SPI Mode 7.1 Introduction The SPI mode consists of a secondary communication protocol that is offered by Flash-based SD Memory Cards. When you use something like Win32DiskImager to prepare an SD card, all you are doing is taking the image file of the distribution you want to use and applying that image to your SD card.
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