Jump to content

MakerBot/How to format SD card for MakerBot

From Wikiversity

Solution found which works if you have the original Makerbot SD card. I used WIN32 Disk Imager to make an image of my original card then wrote that image to a new 16gb card I had. Done it three times now without any issues at all.

Follow the following steps to format the SD card for the makerbot:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

Caution Page Under Construction

The Makerbot only supports FAT system so the memory card had to be formatted to FAT system first. FAT only supports 2 GB memory, so the rest of the memory of the card had to be wasted. First it was tried to format it using the windows by just right clicking the drive, but there were only three options given; NTFS, FAT32 and exFAT. So, to format the SD card to FAT, a software had to be used. MiniTool Partition Wizard was the software first used to format the SD card. It can be downloaded from here.

Several tries were made to format the SD card and it was checked on the makerbot but it did not work. Another way was then tried which was using the cmd.exe. For this go to run and type in cmd.exe. Type in "fromat G: /?" (where G is the name of the drive you want to format). It then gives you some options which are shown in the photo.

After it gives the options, type in "format G: /FS:FAT" and it will start formatting.

This formatting did not work either. It was found that only 2 GB or less could be formatted to FAT system.

Solution found which works if you have the original Makerbot SD card. I used WIN32 Disk Imager to make an image of my original card then wrote that image to a new 16gb card I had. Done it three times now without any issues at all.