Wii won't read my new 2GB SD card?

I just went out and bought a SanDisk 2GB SD card to use with my Wii. Why won't my Wii recognize it? It just says this card cannot be used or something like that. What do I have to do, go out and buy 14 SD cards of various brands and sizes to see if maybe one will work? Is this problem common? Is there anything I could try to make it read the card. This is so frustrating.

Try formatting your SD card using your computer

I've done that a few times on my mac. As far as I know you open disk utility, click on the SD card, choose MS-DOS (FAT) and click erase. Now that I look at it again there is an option to "erase" or "erase free space", not sure what the difference is but I have been choosing "erase". Also you can click security options and there are four options ranging from a quick erase to a 35 pass erase that would take like 8 hours to complete. I have been choosing the first and quickest option which is the default.

Since the Wii still can't read the card I figured I would try formatting it in Windows 7 (I have Parallels on my iMac so I can run Snow Leopard and Windows 7). Wouldn't you know I instantly run into a problem with that. The SD card does not show up under "devices with removable storage" after going to my computer. Instead it shows up under "network location". When I right click it there is no option to format it like there would be if it was under "devices with removable storage". I have no idea why the SD card is being treated as a network location by windows 7.

So I give up on that and grab a laptop with windows xp on it. When I slip the card into the SD card slot the green light next to the slot lights up for a second and then nothing. The card does not show up at all when I click my computer. I went to device manager and attempted to update the driver for it and the computer froze. I fought back the urge to throw the laptop across the room.

So basically the only thing that will recognize my brand new SD card normally is my iMac in Snow Leopard. I'm pretty sure I'm formatting it correctly there but I'm not sure because the Wii won't read it. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

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I fought back the urge to throw the laptop across the room.

Lol. Patience is a virtue. :P

Try making sure that the switch on the side of the SD card is switched to "off."

The switch is in the unlocked position. I noticed that when the card is in the Wii and I go to the photo channel it tells me that the card is corrupted and needs to be formatted. I had been formatting the card and then putting Hackmii and Bannerbomb on it before inserting it into the Wii. Just to see if it made a difference I just formatted it and left it empty. When I put the card into the Wii I got the same result. This card cannot be used or whatever. I'm at a loss and it's a huge bummer because I really want the homebrew channel badly.

I've always found that when formatting devices in my mac, I can't seem to use them with other pc's/devices. I really don't know why.

My suggestion would be to format it in windows, but it would seem as if you can't do that....You could try installing this in windows 7, and then format your SD card with it if the SD card gets recognized.

That SD format program was a great idea but it didn't work. Just like windows 7 doesn't recognize the card as a device able to be formatted, neither does SDFormatter. I even tried the beta version of SDFormatter 3.0 to no avail. Where I would choose the drive to format it is just grayed out and I can't click the drop down menu. When I press the refresh button it doesn't find the card either. I'll have to get my hands on another PC and try to format it again.

I'm sorry, I really would like to help, but I'm out of ideas. I don't understand why it won't be recognized...

Well I installed Windows XP on my iMac using Parallels and it treats the SD card the same way Windows 7 does, as a Network Drive instead of a Device With Removable Storage. This makes me think it is because I am using Parallels on a Mac, when I plug a device into my Mac Windows knows the device is not plugged into PC hardware and calls it a "Network" drive. So I've given up trying to format the SD card in Windows on my Mac.

I am however baffled as to why my PC laptop does not recognize it when I put the card in the SD slot. For some reason when I formatted it on my Mac the card became unreadable by the only true PC I have (and my Wii). Even though I choose MS-DOS (FAT) when formatting. My new goal has become to format the card on my PC laptop and once I do that hopefully it will be readable by the Wii. First I have to get the PC to recognize it because right now it doesn't show up at all under my computer. When it is in, the option to safely remove it does appear on the taskbar and when I click it the computer freezes every time. I don't know if there is a driver I could download for the SD card or something else I could do. I went to SanDisk's website and they offered drivers for USB drives but not SD cards.

I am going to get the homebrew channel on my Wii if it takes ten years and kills me, it will get done!

SOLVED!!!

So I googled around and found a command to enter into the OS X terminal that allowed me to format my SD card in FAT 16 instead of FAT 32 which the disk utility does by default. After this the Wii was able to read my SD card and I installed the homebrew channel. Here it is, maybe this will help someone else someday. TIM will become the name of the card so you can change that to anything.

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

Now... I have no experience with any of this and don't know how to get my burned DVD of Twilight Princess to run. So I'm going to make a new post.

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PPiearce34
Now... I have no experience with any of this and don't know how to get my burned DVD of Twilight Princess to run. So I'm going to make a new post.

No, don't make a new post. Running backups is not supported here, as you should already know.

I'm glad you solved your problem. Time for locking.