Kobo eReader touch
The KOBO eReader touch takes an external microSD card.
After a lot of messing about I realised it can only read SD cards formatted with a mbr/partition table rather than as a superfloppy.
i.e. formatted like a hard drive with a partition table defining where the filesystem starts rather than the first block being the start of the filesystem.
Windows and everything else can cope with either making why it wasn't working at all rather confusing.
Testing
- formatted in Win7 FAT/FAT32/exFAT = not work. This happens by default if the SD card is completely zero wiped.
- create partition & formatted in linux as (vfat)FAT32, ext2, ext4 = fine. (didnt try FAT16)
- create partition & formatted in linux as NTFS = not work
- create partition in linux and formatted as FAT32 in win7 = fine
- create partition in linux and formatted as exFAT in win7 = not work
SDHC cards seem to work fine, I performed most of these tests with a normal 2Gb one but the last two were done with an 8Gb SDHC card.
If you give Windows the card with a partition table on it initially, it will continue to make use of it when formatting in various schemes and will be ok.
Example under linux with 8Gb SDHC card formatted ext4
#adjust /sdd to be your device
#check its unmounted by Nautilus
udisks --unmount /dev/sdd1
#wipe it
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdd bs=1M
#use full card size with first partition
fdisk -H255 -S63 /dev/sdd
#manually eject it now so kernel updates with partition
#format it, in this case ext4
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdd1
#stop wasting reserved space
tune2fs /dev/sdd1 -m0 -O sparse_super -L "8Gb KOBO"
#turn journal off as flash
tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sdd1
