SDHC on Linux

I got hold of an 8GB SDHC card today. As I was with a Windows XP machine, I tested the card with that. It didn't show up in Windows Explorer and under the Microsoft Management Console. the card was "unreadable", whatever that means.

Not to jump to the conclusion that either the card or the card reader was faulty, I downloaded Panasonic's SD Memory Card Formatting Software and formatted the card, just to ensure that it complied with the SD Memory Card specification.

Guess what? After the formatting, the card showed up in Windows explorer but when I clicked on it, Windows prompted me to format it again, which I did. Windows XP failed to complete the format, giving me some silly excuse. Note that the machine had been patched with Service Pack 3, meaning that it already had the hotfix for SDHC support.

I figured that enough was enough, so I inserted the USB card reader into a Linux machine's USB slot. The card, which was formatted to fat32 using Panasonic's software, was immediately recognised. Following that, I fired up GParted and formatted the card to the ext3 format, since I wasn't going to (or rather, I couldn't) use it on a Windoze XP machine.









This is yet another reason why one should never use Micro$oft products.

Why didn't I do a web search for workarounds? Because of Linux.