Using 64GB SD card on 3DS

[Inception9269]

This is something I was needing help with, on behalf of a friend of mine.

 

This past week he dropped off two new 64gb MicroSD cards, with him needing me to format them so that he can use them for his 3DS's (this dude has several, with him being something of a Nintendo wh0re).

 

Officially the 3DS only supports SDHC MicroSD cards, which are capped at 32gb max capacity. Both my friend and I have seen countless posts online about how SDXC cards can work, up to a max file size of 128gb, just that they need to be formatted to fat32. I did just that and gave the two cards back to him, but he tested them and neither was working. He returned the cards to me, and also dropped off the 3DS's they're to go with, and I spent a fair amount of time trying to get them to work, but nothing.

 

I've followed multiple guides online, using the Minitool partition wizard to format them to fat32, with cluster size of 32kb as the guides state, but still nothing (when inserted into the 3DS, just get a message saying no SD card was detected. I have tested it out with the original 32gb cards he was using, with them being detected and working as normal). I even tried this one tool called Guiformat, that I've seen many folks on youtube use, with me doing the exact same things that they were doing in their vids, but for some reason the 3DS won't detect these 64gb cards.

 

I'm wondering if it's just a case where Nintendo, being the infamous buzzkills that they are, decided to issue some kind of system patch to nip that workaround in the bud, since it's something they don't officially support, or if it's specifically a problem with the MicroSD cards my friend bought. I never saw the packaging, so I don't know specifically what their details are, but I took a picture of what they look like.

 

[Trebuchette]

Is the 3DS connected to the WiFi? I seem to vaguely remember that once the 3DS sees a FAT32 card, it'll download a special update to support it. I'm not sure though - my 3DS is using a 128GB card with no issues.

[SteveGrabowski0]

Weird, I used GUIformat to format a 64GB card in my New 3DS XL and it works fine. Though I probably haven't updated firmware in 3-4 years.

[Inception9269]

On 2/28/2023 at 12:59 PM, Trebuchette said:

Is the 3DS connected to the WiFi? I seem to vaguely remember that once the 3DS sees a FAT32 card, it'll download a special update to support it. I'm not sure though - my 3DS is using a 128GB card with no issues.

 

On 2/28/2023 at 8:32 PM, SteveGrabowski0 said:

Weird, I used GUIformat to format a 64GB card in my New 3DS XL and it works fine. Though I probably haven't updated firmware in 3-4 years.

I completely forgot about this thread. I made a similar post on reddit about this cause I wasn't getting any responses here, with reddit not offering any solutions.

 

I did try using Guiformat, and even watched and replicated video guides on formatting them to be used for the 3DS (this is something so basic and trivial, so for me to need to look up a video guide says a lot). The SD cards my friend bought simply wouldn't work no matter what I did, or whatever software I used.

 

In the end I had him order different SD cards off Amazon, with these ones working flawlessly after formatting them to fat32. The amazon page for those ones showed them being used with a Switch, so I figured there was a good chance that they could be made to work with the 3DS, and fortunately I was right.