Intenso SDHC cards?

[peter.skotte 0]

I manage a small UM2E farm, and just purchased a bunch of new SD cards. Intenso SDHC 8GB.

The show up fine when mounted in the computer, and are pre-formatted  in Fat32. However, none of my UM2E can read the card? I just stays in "Reading Card" promt?

I also tried other formats. Same issue.
Is the SDHC the problem, or just the brand?

Thx

[ahoeben 2,047]

Have you tried formatting them again with the "official" SD card formatter?

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/

[peter.skotte 0]

Yes. It makes no difference, unfortunately.

[Slashee_the_Cow 619]

I have never heard of that brand. And I've heard of a lot of brands. It's probably just someone slapping their name on some bottom of the barrel white label Chinese garbage and trying to flip it for a buck.

 

I don't know UM printers so I don't know what exactly they like but I know most Ender-3 printers want cards between 4 and 16GB (actually pretty hard to find them that small these days, from a decent brand), with the card formatted FAT32 and an allocation unit of 4096 bytes. I can't think of any good reason why it'd need that, unless it's lazy and just looking for things by sector instead of the allocation table, but it probably can't hurt to try that in your case.

 

(FWIW... All the cards I've had that have come with Ender-3 printers (four of them) failed within a week. So did three of the included card readers.)

[peter.skotte 0]

Well. These are bought at a local online store i've shopped at multiple times before. Also the cards read and write just fine in 3 different computers. Ots ONLY UM2E printers that fail?

[Dustin 193]

UM2's can sometimes be picky.. all I can say is try another brand.

[CarloK2 15]

At a quick glance, the Intenso cards should be possible to use in the UM2(+).
The UM2 (+) accepts SD and SDHC cards up to 32Gb, SDXC is not supported.
It looks like Intenso is a German company, so not (cheap) white label.

My suspicion is that the card is pre-formatted in a way not understood by the UM2E. The UM2 expects the SD card to be formatted in a very basic way.

 

Recent pre-formatted cards are formatted with a GUID partition table (GPT) where the UM2 can only handle the older Master Boot Record (MBR) mechanism. Even when you format the card again, the original partition scheme remains (see it as being at an even lower level than formatting). That's also why the above formatting tool from the SD-card association fails to fix your problem.

On Linux / MAC it's relative easy to change the partition style, but on Windows I always struggled to change the partition type and alternatively I formatted the card in an old digital camera.
I just tried in Windows 11 using the Disk Management tool, and despite online tutorials saying you can change the partition type, I don't see this option available for my SD card.
Eventually, on Windows 11, the diskpart tool was able to show that the SD card was formatted as 'Gpt' and succeeded in changing it to MBR. See Microsoft tutorial here.

Edited February 6, 2024 by CarloK2

[Slashee_the_Cow 619]

2 hours ago, CarloK2 said:

It looks like Intenso is a German company, so not (cheap) white label.

I'm no expert on Germany, but I can name plenty of Australian companies who put their name on cheap white label stuff and I don't see why it would be much different there.

 

2 hours ago, CarloK2 said:

Recent pre-formatted cards are formatted with a GUID partition table (GPT) where the UM2 can only handle the older Master Boot Record (MBR) mechanism. Even when you format the card again, the original partition scheme remains (see it as being at an even lower level than formatting). That's also why the above formatting tool from the SD-card association fails to fix your problem.

Only SDUC (>2TB) cards should come preformatted with a GPT. The SD (up to 2GB) and SDHC (2-32 GB) standards mandate an MBR partition table with a FAT32 data partition. SDXC (32GB-2TB) standard is for an MBR with an exFAT data partition. If your SDHC card comes with a GPT, then it's afoul of the standards and stupid in general - a GPT is only required above 2TB because an MBR is limited to 2TB, and there's three bazillion older devices out there that have no idea how to read a GPT that the average consumer will expect to stick a card in and it just works - and in my experience, that's always been the case.