Error: Resizing Existing FAT Partition

[supernature2k]

Hi @mikeinnc ,

Thx for this workaround.
Pb is of course not everybody got a camera to do this and it's not normal

If you have several sd cards, could you please do a test and tell me if it works ?

Use partition wizard, create primary fat32 partition, extract archive files on card and put it into rpi?

[tdelios]

@subs @supernature2k @acris @Zelaf @mikeinnc

So, I got good news and some bad news. The good news is I got it to work. I am fortunate enough that I hang in the same food court as engineers of Sun Micro systems (the Unix creators). I told them about my problem and they said that this has been an increased problem for a lot of Linux, Unix and other type of 'inux' operating systems directly due to Windows users. Users who have Linux/Unix operating systems to partition and to format any type of SD cards don't have this issue. They even said that having any type of Class card (Class 1 through 10) has no bearing. That is simply the data transfer speed it can handle to transfer roms in/out of the SD card and tiny processing time to run the roms. The problem with Windows is that from Version 7 to Windows 10 (in both 32 and 64 bit), the partition and formatting seems to be off when some of the windows patches are applied. Not sure which ones as Microsoft won't tell us and nobody has gone through every combination of windows 7-8.1 and Windows 10 automatically applies everything regardless if you want them or not. They said that when you format a hard drive or SD card in these ranges of operating systems, especially from 8.x-10, the SD won't work in other linux/unix devices as windows thinks you'll be using those storage devices for its own purpose. They said that not all users having windows 7-10 are having the same problem as me, but if they would accurately guess from their experiences hearing in their own world, that its between 75-90% of people they run into.

Their suggestion is one of two. First, they said that if I have a Windows XP laying around to use it to partition, fat32 format and unzip the install files into the micro SD card. That actually worked!! and it worked for ALL my cards regardless of manufacturer and class and both Pi 2 and Pi 3

The bad news is that the Windows XP computer was a friend's of mine as all my computers at home are Windows 10. I even took my SD cards and my Pis to one of the engineer's house (as he is familiar with Pis, emulators and such) to test their theory as they have both windows 10 (64 bit) and Windows XP and they experienced the exact same problem on windows 10, even with their own SD cards.. But once they partitioned and formatted his and my SD cards and unzipped the install file into them from a windows xp machine, they worked like a charm..

They gave me advice which they suggested to pass onto whoever is creating RecalBox or give advice to the owner of Recalbox. This problem with SD cards is a dirty little secret that the world knows but a lot of people don't know how to truly fix as its a Windows issue. That is why the folks who created Raspberry, PiPay, RetroPie and other apps created their own IMG files so that people can simply use the Win32DiskImager tool to extract onto their SD cards regardless of Windows version. They said that if Recalbox wants to increase footprint of their product, they should create their own IMG files. New users who want to try out and use RecalBox and have little patience unlike myself will bail on the product on the first or second attempt out of frustration as googling the answer doesn't really help and asking forums for advice is a crap shoot unless they read this specific post.

Now that I have a working installed vanilla version, they said that I should use Win32DiskImager to backup the image off of the SD card and store it in a safe. They said that this image can simply be restored on any micro SD card regardless if size and class. So I tested that theory and he was correct. I used my Windows 10 machine and saved one of the images using Win32DiskImager. On the same Windows 10 machine, I then used Partition Wizard to partition and FAT32 format all my micro SD cards(regardless of manufacturer, size and class), and then used Win32DiskImager to restore from my backed up IMG file. THEY ALL WORK after doing full regression testing on them regardless if the backup image was done on a Pi 2 and restored on a Pi 3 and vise versa.

So not sure who is in charge of the forum to put the bug in the developer's ear, but a decision needs to be made to either create IMG install files or have a section in the forum where someone can drop their own vanilla IMG file installed version. The number of computers being upgraded to windows 10 is increasing and if the creators want to increase their footprint in this area, they need to address this request.

peace out
Tom

[Substring]

I'm part of the developer team, i'll strongly encourage my dear @digitaLumberjack to read this

[Nachtgarm]

@tdelios I cannot second that. I am using 4 different PCs and Laptops running Windows 7, Wiindows 10 and Ubuntu. On ALL machines, I was able, with no problem at all, to format my SanDisk Ultra 32GB Class 10 with either SDFormatter (using a MicroSD to USB Stick) or Partition Creator on Linux. I did this 50+ times now (different and same cards) and all of my tries were successes. I am on the latest update states on all windows machines (no exceptions) and all of the Window Version are either Ultimate, or Pro 64bit. The SD cards were all brand new. No preformatting. I ieven used diskpart once to create the partitions for a SD Card and it worked like a charm as well.

[Substring]

@Nachtgarm and @tdelios i've had the resize error problem with a samsung SD. Strangely, that SD was working just perfect for raspbian, but not with NOOBS. Be it recalbox or raspbian, NOOBS would just stall when resizing the partitions. The guyez over at PiHut told me that it's a NOOBS bug, nothing to do with formatting.

Anyway, the use of NOOBS has 1 big advantage : providing a single zip for rpi[0123] whereas IMG means 1 IMG file per architecture.

I personnally think we should provide both : ZIP and IMG, but so far we've been limited by buildroot to automatize the IMG building process. Looks like @susan33 found a solution for XU4, so we may reconsider the IMG for pi.

And, as I have already pointed somewhere, one can still do like https://github.com/recalbox/recalbox-os/wiki/Recalbox-development---basics-(EN)#install-your-sources-on-an-sd-card to get rid of NOOBS. I even think http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/ext2.html or http://www.fs-driver.org/ for windows might work to untar the root filesystem

[mcsper]

@mikeinnc I was having the same issue reformatting (except it didn't take 45 mins to reformat) and the reformatting in the camera worked! Thanks so much for the tip. I have a canon camera as well.

[paradadf]

@tdelios out of curiosity... Did you try using this software after SD Formatter?

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?guiformat.htm

SD Formatter shouldn't take more than a few seconds, regardless of the size!

This is an old post I created about SD Cards Compatibility:
https://forum.recalbox.com/topic/2138/sd-cards-compatibility

[tdelios]

@paradadf nope.. Depending on the different scenarios on the different windows operating system versions we tried:

• using Windows' own format utility right after SD Formatter
• not using anything after SD Formatter
• not even using SD Formatter, but simply used the format feature within 'MiniTool Partition Wizard' right after using the same tool to delete and re-create the partition

Regardless which scenario we did, as long as we had a working installed copy on a micro SD card, we used 'Win32DiskImager' to restore the image on any number of micro SD cards regardless of size and class and they all worked smoothly.

Either way, my point is that we are up to 3-4 different types of software to get RecalBox working. Not acceptable working in the software industry for 20+ years regardless if its free or not. If you want the adoption of Recalbox to spread, the installation should be painless and using 1 piece of software and should work each and every time regardless of size and class of the micro SD card.
Imagine how many people you don't know gave up that ran into the same situation as myself. A ton of them. RetroPie guys know this, the guys who make the Pi know this.. even the Unix guys know this. To get around it, they simply imaged a working micro SD card.

At face value, unzipping a installation file onto a micro SD card from a windows computer seemed to be the easiest and best way to get the software loaded, but its been a nightmare. I'm surprised that Recalbox doesn't have a vanilla IMG file as some sort of alternative solution beyond that cheezy micro SD compatibility listing doc that people wasted their time updating. Yes, I call it cheezy because as a test, I went out of my way to randomly buy half of those "incompatible" micro SD cards on amazon and did the same restore from my own IMG file onto them and did a full regression test. Guess what.. they all worked, or at least for me they did.

[paradadf]

@tdelios first of all... I'm not a part of the developers team. I'm just a normal Recalbox user that helps to moderate the spanish forum

If you read my old thread, you know that I was so irritated as you by the fact that people were marking sd cards as incompatible, even if the problem came from the user side. I just wanted you to try the guiformat.exe, as it solved my installations problems. If you have the time, I would like, out of curiosity as I said before, to know if using that formatting tool helps you without the need of you camera.

One more thing... if your sd card, your computer or whatever hardware you are using needs 30 minutes to format your sd card(s) using sd formatter, then there is something wrong with one of them. A 64Gb sd card needs only about 2-3 seconds to get formatted.

Best regards and have fun playing!

[tdelios]

@paradadf I will try the GUIformat.exe and see if it helps this weekend. Not sure what you mean about my 'camera'.. never mentioned anything about a camera? I also never mentioned anything about a slow format, 30 minutes or otherwise.. just like you said, all my SD cards regardless of size or class format in about 2-3 seconds as you mentioned.

I will let you know this weekend the results of that format utility you mentioned.

cheers
tom

[Substring]

@tdelios as I said earlier (and I'm part of the team), .img should come for the next version, that is 4.1. Features are frozen for 4.0, we are just correcting the few remaining bugs before the next beta. Installing 4.0 is done by installing a simple architecture-less zip on a fat32 formatted SD, we won't change that in the current release

I'm not sure if guiformat ereases the partition table or just partitions and formats a whole SD

Now everyone switch to good mood on

[paradadf]

@tdelios ups, I mixed the answers posted here and there an user spoke about that, sorry.

[colera100dragoes]

Hello everyone,

I have the same error in my SD card Sandisk 32gb in raspberry pi3 model B.
I try in another sd card Sandisk 4gb and work ok, but the memory is less and I like to put on 32gb.

Any solution?

[Substring]

@colera100dragoes You can use an USB key for external storage

[colera100dragoes]

Good news.

I managed to solve this error as follows.

In a machine Windows XP SP3, used the SD formater 4 with the "full (overwrite) and Turning" on "activated and the FAT32 format.
After the end of the process, I accessed the "diskmgmt.msc" windows to check the partitions, and the same was only one partition in FAT32.
I copied the files back to the SD card and the system worked.

[hughesadam87]

Just to update as of 1/18/17

I've bought two recalbox kits from the suggested parts on the main page. I received this error each time.

Not sure if it's the card, or that it's pre-installed with noobs, but the solution in both cases was to choose

Format Size Adjustment = On

in te scandisk utility. You can still use quick format, but please turn this option on and it should bypass the error.

[Nanolight]

Hi,

I would like to add my two cents to this.

I bought a 64GB Samsung card and ran into countless freaking problems including the resize issue, as well as the wrong MBR/GPT errors. Using Win10 on my Pentuim NUC I couldn't format to FAT32 because Microsoft are j**ks (while I was working on it my NUC just decided to reboot and do Windows updates with out any warning, dropping my remote access session, god d**n Microsoft I swear!).

I couldn't get anything to work, no software would format the memory card into a usable format (I tried many useless packages, no doubt many of them work on WinXP or Win 7 maybe but not Win 10).

So the problem is clearly Windows and it's refusal to let me do what I want. So the way I got around all of this was to first download the OpenELEC img file and use Win32 disk imager (Run as Admin) to write that image to the memory card. This got the memory card in the right format I needed (probably due to all the messing around with it I had done). Afterwards I used MiniToolPartition Wizard Free to delete the FAT32 partition, then created a new PRIMARY (not Logical, very important!!!!) 15GB or so FAT32 partition. After that I right clicked the archive in Windows and used Winrar to extract to the card, then unmount and it worked.

There needs to be an img file, very very very needs to be one. I appreciate the effort the devs of recalbox go to for us in the community but making an img file will help make things as painless as possible.

[Nanolight]

Well... ignore my last post...

After the install scripts successfully run the Pi reboots and flashes white, then gray, then rainbow and repeats for ever...

Back to square one... sigh...

[Tom]

I tried all of the various solutions mentioned here (including camera formatting without success.

I was successful when using guiformat on a Windows 10 machine with the quick format option checked and the Allocation Unit Size set to 4096, not the default 32768.

Hope this helps.

Now my problem is after RecalBoxOS starts my monitor report the display timing is not supported....... This should not be so hard......

[chill8ut]

Works perfectly when formated with my NIKON 1 J1 camera (Sandisk 16Go Ultra)
Va comprendre Charles...