Formatting SD card as TexFAT for WinCe

Question

I am using MicroSD cards as the storage on an embedded system running WinCe. Recently I have found Cards made by the same manufacturer in different parts of the world have differences and cause us issues.

I read at the SD Association about the formatting issues that windows formatters produce so I downloaded their SD Memory Card Formatter. That is good but we run our SD cards in WinCe as TexFat. So what I now do is format the card with a FAT32 partition so the PC will put the software onto the card. Then the WinCE system will format the other partition to TexFat and copy the software onto that on the first boot with the new card.

The question is what is the correct way to format a SD card as TexFat for WinCE from a PC? Any suggestions?

Answer 1

After lots of head scratching I found the answer is simple. The winCE partition has to be formatted TexFAT on the winCE system which was not a problem, the bit I did not know is that I needed to change the clusters. Once I changed the 8GB to have 4k clusters the time to write to the card decreased a lot. I have since tried other sizes and find that you need to play with the cluster size to get the optimum out of the card.