Are you a communist? /s
Jokes aside. I'd love to see this standardized and widely available with a document why SD cards needs to be formatted this way, but I think everyone is afraid that someone's patent or secret or something will be revealed, and its library form is probably, really a revenue stream for them.
Shortsighted, I may say.
Also, this tool exists to fix card errors at field and reduce support costs, not to advocate their superior jutsu of formatting. The latter is not the point.
The fundamental problem, I think, is that FOSS didn't really take off in Japan the way it did in US/EU, for some reason. There are tons of code-literate engineers but way less who would be sympathetic with developer community building, code sharing, licensing discussions, etc., that are more common in communities from US/EU.
I could've done it without AI (I've done it before) but it would've taken me 20x longer.
I didn't see that the first time around so this re-post was interesting, thanks! There's a bit of discussion in the other thread about the "protected area" - anyone got good links to the minutiae of that? How big is it, what tools exist to access it etc. ?
https://www.sdcard.org/developers/sd-standard-overview/conte...
However you can see from the parent comment:
> Success of mutual authentication enables host to access card protected area.
So it's something the memory control must make available after a handshake, and then I presume either some specific memory address or set of retrieval commands would follow.
As you mention, it also states this spec is now optional.
I know "modern" cards have no space, but if it's important to you, you can still use the full size adapters which should (all?) have the physical lock. Super glue that in place...
It seems to fix things where Windows File Explorer's formatter and other tools fail. A simple tool that does a really good job. It has even fixed some partition weirdness I've needed to deal with.
I had a wonky HIKSemi USB flash drive, which turned out to be partitioned in a very unaligned way, and neither the flash nor the controller liked that much. Doing it manually and making sure it's aligned (which gparted does automatically) converted it to a very dependable drive.
Seems weird it can be applied to bitlocker to go volumes.
chrism238•1d ago
ycombinatrix•1d ago
Almondsetat•1d ago
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robin_reala•3h ago
Note: If you have a Mac with Apple silicon, e.g. M1, you might be asked to install Rosetta in order to open the SD Card Formatter.