Aura HD Formatting Expansion Memory Cards?

[Richwood]

Could not find a way for the Kobo reader to format a expansion memory card stand alone so I hooked it to a Windows computer with USB cable and used the computer to format a 8 GB Micro SD expansion card while it was installed in the reader.

Without formatting the card the reader thought it was a 4 GB card, what it had contained earlier. Once formatted in the reader it was recognized as the correct size card. WTF?

The user's guide from Kobo sucks as no mention of expansion memory at all that I could find and apparently no expansion memory formatting. In fact I could not find a main memory formatting instruction other than if it is included in a Factory Reset.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Richwood

Could not find a way for the Kobo reader to format a expansion memory card stand alone so I hooked it to a Windows computer with USB cable and used the computer to format a 8 GB Micro SD expansion card while it was installed in the reader.

Without formatting the card the reader thought it was a 4 GB card, what it had contained earlier. Once formatted in the reader it was recognized as the correct size card. WTF?

Depends on what the card was previously formatted with. I have one micro SD card which is supposedly made by/for Kingston. Oddly, the card is only 4GB despite having been sold as a 32GB card and Kingston states no such serial number. The size was inferred from information read using the F3 toolset along with the serial number.

Originally Posted by Richwood

The user's guide from Kobo sucks as no mention of expansion memory at all that I could find and apparently no expansion memory formatting. In fact I could not find a main memory formatting instruction other than if it is included in a Factory Reset.

Given that a good chunk of the main memory is not accessible unless you SSH into your Kobo ereader, advice on reformatting the main memory would be limited to formatting the exposed partition. This should trigger a factory reset sequence so why bother?

[frostschutz]

For the external SD card, Kobo expects there to be a single partition (partition number 1) and FAT32 filesystem. The internal SD card has three partitions (1 root, 2 recovery, 3 user data), when you hook it up to USB you only get a view of partition 3.

It's possible to create a 4GB partition/filesystem on a 8GB card. In particular this happens if you do a 1:1 copy from 4GB to 8GB card without resizing the copy.

Resizing partitions is not something the Kobo is normally able to do by itself, I had a mod (Magic Memory Upgrade Mod) that does this for using Kobo standalone to upgrade the internal card without PC assistance, but I haven't tested in a while if it still works.

[Richwood]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Depends on what the card was previously formatted with. I have one micro SD card which is supposedly made by/for Kingston. Oddly, the card is only 4GB despite having been sold as a 32GB card and Kingston states no such serial number. The size was inferred from information read using the F3 toolset along with the serial number.

Card is a new SanDisk, never used. Put a new 16 GB Kingston card in the Kobo Aura H2O, version 1, and it was correctly recognized instantly. The same for memory expansion cards added to Sony readers. Sony readers do have a memory format menu item for internal memory and expansion cards. 3 choices on many as they had two expansion card slots, SD card and Memory Stick Duo.

Any way formatting the memory card in the Kobo expansion slot via the Windows computer and USB cable did work.