Just purchased a sandisk 64gb microsd. When I put it in, windows says it needs to be formatted. I went to format it as exfat but it only sees the drive as27gb. Same thing if I select ntfs. Is there something I am doing wrong or is this a faulty microsd card. If I use swissknife to look at the removable drives, it shows the drive as being 64GB and formatted already.
Fat32! There's only one format you can use being Fat not exFat or NTFS for any memory card including those on cell, smart phones, etc. This is the manufacturers's standards across the board unlike you typical flash drive or SSD if not other drive.
The cell phones, cameras, and other portables will see a Fat 32 volume as soon as you select the format option on any of those. Unfortunately now you will have to see if you can view the other Fat volume and nuke both off the card in order to see just the one 60.4644gb actual space.
I guess I will go ahead and format it then. I have not formatted it yet. When I changed options to ntfs, fat32 or exfat it only sees the 27gb. I will look for a hidden partition.
Generally the reason for this has to do with being able to use the same card with any OS since Fat sees cross platform support in other OSs like Linux and mainly Apple/Mac for use on those OSs as well as on any Windows machine.
What that does is make the file system used(Fat 32) universal. The other thing missed often however with any portable device if that takes the same SD card would be the onboard memory being a separate item and the memory options to move from onboard or card. The card is then viewed as a new logical drive if the device can be plugged into a usb port.
The good thing about 7 these days with all these new gadgets was the return of Fat support removed from Vista but now needed for external drives that come with exFat as well as hand helds. Just when everybody though Fat would finally be a dead concept and soon long forgotten... SURPRISE!
When looking the DM there be sure to look under Removable devices for the second if any volume. You may find there's no other volume at all. The card is simply "raw" being new and waiting for the right file system.
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