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SD Card Formating?

202 Views 4 Replies 4 Participants Last post by  Ifti, 
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I’m heading off to start the trip to Everest Base Camp tomorrow.

Yesterday I couldnt record anything on the GoPro Mini - it’d be alive for 2 seconds and then crash EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Id got some beautiful footage on training runs/hikes back in Australia, but here is really where I want things to work so its quite frustrating.

The only thing I can think is that the big 1TB SD card I got for this trip is no good. So Ive put the older 256GB card in and it seems to be ok still.

BUT - theres some old footage that I want to clear to maximise the available space on the 256GB card. So I attempted a “delete all and format” operation from the app on my phone only to get a “failed” error back.

next step was a “sd format” on the camera itself using the tiny and almost impossible to read screen.
Its been 12hrs now and it still says “Formatting” with the wavy animated line.

Does anyone know how long this is going to take? Are there any suggestions of how to format the 1TB card to see if I can get that usable in the next 24 hours? (I have no laptop here in Kathmandu - just iPhone and GoPro).

all in all I’m finding this quite frustrating and Ill devastated if I cant use the camera for the Everest Marathon (run down valley from EBC) as planned
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Ifti
Formatting should only take a minute at most - if that!
The format process is not low level, hence data on the card is not deleted - its just marked as overwritable - so this should only take a few seconds irrespective of the card capacity : certainly not hours (that is what I would expect for a low level format where all data is zero'd out).
Do you have a lower capacity card you can just use to test?? Could be that you have a clone card, hence why the errors when formatting - with clone cards the capacity can be read as 256GB or 1TB, but when the system tries to format to use that capacity, it cant find the memory cells, and hence errors.....
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Fish
256gb cards are what gopro stated in the manual.
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A
If you're having trouble formatting the 1TB card using the camera's screen, try formatting it using the GoPro app on your iPhone. Open the app, connect to your GoPro Mini, go to the settings or camera controls section, and look for an option to format the SD card.
Formatting a large-capacity SD card can take a considerable amount of time, especially if it's done through the camera's screen. So allow some time to format. Also, If you have access to an internet cafe or a local photo store in Kathmandu, you could try formatting the SD cards using their computers.
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Ifti
Ankit Raj said:
Formatting a large-capacity SD card can take a considerable amount of time, especially if it's done through the camera's screen.
Click to expand...
Not really - my 256GB cards format in around 5-10 seconds since the camera performs a quick format only, not a full format (which involves zero'ing out all sectors - and which the GoPro does not do).
I still think the OP has clone cards.
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