TIP: Formatting SD card in OS X Snow Leopard

Hi all,

being new to the Wii mod-community, I did my first softmod yesterday. Had lots of issues, but one was more annoying than anyone else: SD card formatting on a mac.

A lot of guides tell you to format the SD-card to Fat32. This might work from windows, but on Os X Snow Leopard, it doesn´t. The Wii plain won´t read the card. I went through 4 cards until I accidentally figured it out. So, for others who might run into the same problem, here is how to solve it.

Using "Disk Utility" is useless, as it formats the card to Fat32 with no options to change it.

### Note: This guide wipes your SD-card clean, and if not done correct, might wipe other disks/harddrives connected to your computer.

* First up, properly eject the card, and remove it from the computer.
* Open up "Terminal".
* Type the following:

Code:

ls /dev/disk*

Pay attention to what disks it lists. Disk0 is usually your main HDD.

*Now insert the SD-card, and type:

Code:

ls /dev/disk*

Now you will see a new disk in the list. This is the SD-card you inserted. You might also see "Disk1s2", ignore those, as the "s2" just denotes different partitions on the card.

Let´s assume your card is /dev/disk1

* Type the following:

Code:

diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk1 1 MBRFormat "MS-DOS FAT16" "Wii_card" 1000M

### Note: the 1000M you see there is how big the partition is, ie. how big the card is. 1000M=1GB. If your card is bigger, use 2000M etc. If it is smaller, try 600K. It either tells you the number is wrong, or it fills the card. Experiment with different values.

(The 1 after disk1 is number of partitions you want, so if you want more than 1, type 2)

This will partition and format the card to Fat16, and it is now ready for your Wii. It should pop up in Finder as "Wii_card" as soon as it is done.