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The MicroSD card that came with my phone shows up as simply 'FAT' in Windows XP. This 2GB card works well in my HTC Wildfire running FroYo.

I bought a new 16GB MicroSD which is formatted as 'FAT32' but this does not work well in my phone although Windows picks it up fine.

The formatting option under settings on my phone just hangs. ('Do you want to force close this application?')

I had formatted the 16GB card in Windows before I found the SDFormatter utility. Using the SDFormatter utility now does not make a difference.

I have read that the actual filesystem for Android is YAFFS but I cannot find a utility for Windows that will format it as such.

What can I do to get a YAFFS filesystem (or plain 'FAT') on this card?

n.b. As a side note, my phone was faulty. It now works fine with FAT32

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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In Settings -> SD card and phone storage there is an option to format the sdcard. You first have to unmount the sdcard before you can format it.

Format sdcard

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    Correct. Always use the device's internal formatting functionality to perform a format. This holds true for other electronic devices like digital cameras / mp3 players etc. as well.
    – Sparx
    Feb 25, 2011 at 14:43
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    Yeah unfortunately, this hangs when I try it - It asks me if I want to force quit - I chose 'Wait' in-case it is just taking a long time with the the larger card size, but it does not seem to end (5 minutes)
    – Brendan
    Feb 25, 2011 at 14:50
  • Sounds more like a problem with the actual sdcard then. If you think that is not that case, then I would still format with the built in option. every card I ever bought came formatted as FAT32 and android picked it up just fine.
    – Ryan Conrad
    Feb 25, 2011 at 16:51
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You could try booting into recovery. There may be an option to format from there, but I'm fairly certain it would only be a feature of custom recoveries... Worth trying though!

With the wildfire I think you hold down power and the volume button, which takes you into hboot. From there you can scroll (with the volume buttons) to recovery. That will take you to the recovery screen, where a series of options should be available.

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