is my ebay sd card fake?

timster123

I just bought a 128gb micro sd card in an sd card adapter with retropie roms and kodi from ebay.
I'm awaiting arrival of my raspberry pi in which i'll use it, but i just put it in my pc's sd card slot and it's showing as 36.6mb of 56.8mb free.
So is that it's actual capacity or is there something i'm not aware of in this situation?

TadleyBaggie

It's possible the card has been partitioned and that half of it is just unallocated space. Take a look using Disk Manager (or whatever it is called nowadays).

emptybox

To open 'Disk Management' in Windows, start typing "partitions" in the search box, and "Create and format hard disk partitions" will be one of the top results.
It'll tell you in there what partitions and of what sizes are on the SD card.

If it's a Linux PC, then gparted does the same.

Having said that, some of these fakes can fool Windows into displaying the wrong size.

bluesnake

As above and do the disk manager thing, but personally I would wipe all the partition and then start from fresh.

The important thing it to check the card (and usb drives too) with H2testw 1.4 and uncovers fraudulent and errors on storage
https://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/h2testw-14-gold-standard-in-detecting-usb-counterfeit-drives/

paddyrg

36.6mb of 56.8mb

Assuming that's 36.6MB of 56.8MB, that's still MASSIVELY short of 128GB

Ebay is absolutely rife with fake memory cards though, positively dripping in them, so by default it's pretty safe to assume it's hooky. Run the test as above, see what it says.

LadyDee

And if you find it is fake, don't get into an argument with the seller, just open an item not as described with ebay/paypal and ask for a refund.

Lumstorm

It's possible that Windows isn't seeing the Linux partions on the card, so it reporting a false capacity.

kwikbreaks

I doubt it has any linux partions or even multiple partitions unless it is secondhand. Every SD card I've ever bought came preformatted with a single partition.

Thumbs up on open not-as-described dispute on eBay suggestion assuming it does turn out to be dodgy - it works and you get your money back. When I did it I got to keep the duff SD card too but just binned it anyway as it was reporting the sold size but not storing it.

emptybox

kwikbreaks wrote: »

I doubt it has any linux partions or even multiple partitions unless it is secondhand. Every SD card I've ever bought came preformatted with a single partition.

Thumbs up on open not-as-described dispute on eBay suggestion assuming it does turn out to be dodgy - it works and you get your money back. When I did it I got to keep the duff SD card too but just binned it anyway as it was reporting the sold size but not storing it.

Yeah, but remember the OP bought it with Kodi and various ROMs already on it. It's not an empty card.
And they are intending to use it with their Raspberry Pi, which is run on Linux.

S0litaire

1st DON'T format it!!!

The other partitions needed for Kodi are in a format Windows CAN'T usually read!!

*NOTE*

Windows will usually only be able to see/access the first partition on any "sd-card" (with r-Pi installs that's usually a "boot" partition which is only a few 10mbs in size.)

Linux and mac should be able to see ALL partitions on a SD-Card.


This driver will let you see/access linux partitions in Windows :

http://www.ext2fsd.com/

download link:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/files/Ext2fsd/0.69/Ext2Fsd-0.69.1035-09.14.exe/download

S0litaire

kwikbreaks wrote: »

I doubt it has any linux partions or even multiple partitions unless it is secondhand. Every SD card I've ever bought came preformatted with a single partition.

If it's from a re-seller. Then they have installed their build of Kodi (With assorted questionable plugins...) which means multiple partitions on the SD-Card.

The user is only seeing the /boot partition in Windows (it's usually an vfat or fat32 partition) The other partitions windows can't read so it ignores them.

The boot partition is usually around the 50mb-100mb size so this looks ok.