FAT12?

[Ching]

I got a Nomad II mp3 player. I use to switch my smartmedia card back and forth with my digital camera. Recently, the Nomad II does not recognize the card anymore. It keeps telling me "Unknown format". When I look at the manual, it tells me that Nomad II only recognize smarmedia card that has FAT12. It tells me that I need to format my smarmedia card to FAT12. So my question is: How am I going to do that? do I need special kind of software, since windows does not have that option. Can anyone helps me out? Thanks

 

[bsobel]

> do I need special kind of software, since windows does not have that option

Windows does have 'that option', but it's usually just called the fat file system (instead of FAT32 or NTFS, etc). You should be able to drop your card into your windows box (presuming you have a usb or pcmcia adatper) and just format it normally. The cards are so small that FAT (FAT12) will be used autmatically.

Bill

 

[CTho9305]

hmm, i think fat12 is the filesystem used on floppies. If you format it in windows, it might use fat16 instead, but i'm not sure

 

[Nothinman]

FAT12 should be used for any partition under 32M I believe, you really don't have a choice which FAT version it uses with MS' tools.

 

[Ching]

That mean I am out of luck. I did format the card many time, and still NOMAD tells me "Unknown Format". I gess I will try to buy a smartmedia from Creative to test if it the smartmedia problem or the NOMAD itself. Anyway, thank you 🙁

 

[EHobaX]

You may want to upgrade the firmware on your Nomad.

 

[Electrode]

This is yet another bullet point of a reason why windows is an AWFUL operating system. Why the fvck won't M$ put something as simple and useful as an -F switch in their format tool?

If you have access to Linux, or at least a DOS or windows port of mkdosfs, you could just do mkdosfs -F 12 /dev/card_device and be all set.