I bought some 32G micro SD cards on eBay, and on advice I check to see if they were all actually 32G. There's a program available under Linux called "f3". I'm running 3.5.0 http://oss.digirati.com.br/f3/ What it does is write a pattern, step and repeat To quote from the man page <quote> F3 (Fight Flash Fraud or Fight Fake Flash) tests the full capacity of a flash card (flash drive, flash disk, pendrive). It writes to the card and then checks if can read it. It will assure you haven't been sold a card with a smaller capacity than stated. When writing to flash drive, f3write fills the filesystem with 1GB files named N.h2w, where N is a number (i.e. /[0-9]+/). </quote> The the f3read program verifies. You have control over the starting and ending numbers, so if you think the 32G drive is actually a 8G you can skip the first 6G and just do 7G to 9G. I found that indeed the 32G labelled chips were actually 8G. There's a tool that re-writes the chip ID info and so I made sure that theses 8G chips said they were 8G. And I got my money back. FOSS wins out again. There are free version of similar tools for Windows as well. ------------------- I do however have a question. Running these tests takes a lot of time. I'm wondering if there is a quicker way. I'm wondering if there is a file system whereby the mkfs builds a FS structure all the way down to the supposed end of the media, perhaps some kind of b-tree, then the fsck verifies it actually is what it supposed to be, that if the supposed 32G was actually a 8G and writes wrapped around somehow. checking the (empty, before commuting data) tree structure would show this up and give some clue as to the where? It seems reasonable to me, but a simple fsck fail would not give information on the actual size, would it? Just that the structure was buqqered. Any thoughts on this? -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org