Late September and Beyond
19 Oct 2019Time to get serious, day 3 of my micro SD card being unabe to write. Trying to configure a replacement and back up my data. So a gotcha that I ran into is the documentation on the website states to use the SD Card Formatter. If it was a regular SD card I do believe it might work out of the box. However, for SDXC cards Nintendo seems to have a troubled history with them (personal experience included).
From personal experience I’ve run into formatting issues on both the Switch and the 3DS. Luckily the Switch has a formatting tool built-in, so if you’re wrong you can format it on the Switch before attempting to reload the data on it. On the switch it’s further complicated by the nature of cloud saves. Essentially you could easily copy over the save data as long as it’s not a cloud save. The game data is a bit more lenient, but still annoying.
First off the format from the Formatter application recommended by Nintendo formats it into EX-FAT, when it needs to be FAT32 otherwise known as MS-FAT32. This is a gotcha, luckily I just use the tool that I learned yesterday to convert it with this command: sudo diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 NAME MBRFormat <path>. After converting it to the correct format I had to manually add chunks of data to not upset the old read/write speed of a spinning disk to a flash.
The documentation on the website treats the data on the SD card as if it was a grail. From what I gathered from talking to people, Nintendo runs their devices on a fork of Linux. The file directory system is readable on both Linux-based and Windows based computers… It runs on a FAT32… the dots connect to suggest that the SD card probably just reads data off it via the file system and not by some crazy bit or assembly execution that I was initially worried about.
Thus I decided to not treat it like a monolith and start copying over files manually when they fail as well as create folders with the same name to ease the transition of folders (copying over sub-folders to split up the load). Any issue can be checked by using Kaleidoscope including the binary data.
Wasn’t too hard when I started doing this rather than trying to copy the whole folders. It would be interesting to see how they encode the games and how it all works, but I really want to start working on personal projects and get back to prepping for graduate school.
There were issues with that look to be temporary tiles or pointers, I just ignore the warnings until the end and copied those over manually at the end. I suspect that they are used in the virtual console games as they were really scant. I used Kaleidoscope to do one last check before calling it.