SD card, Rev. C board, can't update firmware

[bretth]

Hello,

I've finally got all my Amstrad CPC6128 bits out of storage and am having a decent fiddle with it. After a bit of patience I managed to get the X-MEM working and some ROMs flashed - cool. I'm struggling though to update the firmware of my rev. C HxC floppy emulator from 1.5.1.0 to the latest (currently 1.8.2.40).

I've tried a couple of SD cards (16MB SD, 256MB micro SD) and formatted as FAT on both Mac OS X (10.11) and Windows (10 running under VMWare Fusion on the Mac).

After powering on with left & right buttons held, I consistently get the four-flash error (UPD file not found). I'm perplexed how to solve this issue.

I only have access to a Mac (or Windows running under VMware Fusion on the Mac) - the SD card is always "freshly formatted" as FAT (with MBR) and the UPD file is then immediately copied across and is the only file on the card.

I'm going to keep trying ... but what am I doing wrong?

Thanks.

Brett.

[Jeff]

You need to format the SD in FAT32 (the 32 is very important).

[bretth]

Thanks for the reply Jeff!

Yep, I figured the FAT32 was vital but it's not possible to select FAT32 on Mac - the only options (on Mac) are FAT (which is FAT32 anyway??) or exFAT.

I've checked my Windows 10 installation (upgraded from Windows 7 over the weekend) and I can see its options are NTFS, FAT32 (default) and exFAT.

I'll try once again formatting the SD card under Windows 10 - I thought I'd already tried that, but maybe it was still running Windows 7 (which only gave "FAT" as an option?). It was a busy weekend.

Thanks again - it's a great bit of kit.

Brett.

[bretth]

Ahhh, okay I can see what was happening.

When I tried to format the 16MB SD card it only gives NTFS, FAT, exFAT as options.

When I check a USB drive, it gives FAT32 as an option.

Why can't I format an SD card as FAT32 then?

(Rhetorical question, I'm going to start searching the web for an answer).

[bretth]

Success!

Okay, so the problem was that my SD card wasn't big enough.

I had tried a 16MB and a 256MB but these only are offered FAT format in Windows. I had assumed this was FAT32.

I then tried a 16GB card and was offered FAT32 format.

But makes sense - why would you need to use FAT32 on smaller-sized drives? I guess there might've been someway under DOS to force FAT32 ... anyway, doesn't matter.

Thanks again Jeff.

[Jeff]

I can format 64MB and 128MB SD in FAT32 without problem here (Windows XP)