Somebody have a guess here please.

I have a newish Anycubic 3d Printer, newish (large)sdcard in terms of usage, and a new (large) one with only one disk image ever put on it. These fit straight into the sdcard slot with no adapter.

I made filesystems on them, one with mkfs.fat, and one with mkfs.vfat, copied 4 or 5 files onto them and put them in the 3d printer. The one with mkfs.vfat sees one file. The one made with mkfs.fat sees none. I'm on slackware-15.0.

mkfs.fat is a program. mkfs.vfat & mkfs.msdos are symlinks, so I'm guessing

• mkfs.msdos = fat-16
• mkfs.fat = fat-32
• mkfs.vfat = vfat.

I can see all the files fine in Linux. The printer won't read ntfs. All this has started out of the blue, on both sdcards.

No further detective work possible. Guesses/Suggestions?

As far as I know if you do not specify the FAT size with the -F option mkfs.fat will pick the best fit for filesystem size. For a large card I would expect FAT32 but you can verify with the file command.

The difference between FAT and VFAT is support for long filenames which I believe that mkfs.fat adds regardless of FAT size. Does the one file that is recognized have a 8.3 filename format where the others do not?

They're 4G & 64G with .gcode extensions. No 8.3 here. That settles it then.

Any thoughts why I'm only seeing 1 file?

Not a clue.

Now I had made a vfat filesystem for the 64G card, and that sees one file (out of 4).

I dd'ed zeroes all over the 4G card, made a filesystem with 'mkfs.fat -F 32' and that sees 2 files (out of 4). Fine tuning temperatures ATM, so I'm just using the Cal Cube, but any ideas are welcome.

Given that the sdcards read & write fine on the pc, but fail in the printer, I eventually made an unusual finding in favour of the sdcards and against the printer.

The one thing I wanted to explore is this: If memory serves, at some stage M$ had a fat/vfat version with long file names and an 8.3 directory listing as well with truncated filenames for old stuff to use. Which version was that, and does mkfs.fat re-create it? This first came out back around the days of win 95/98, iirc. Windows 3.x was all 8.3 filenames.

The anycubic manual says to format sdcards fat32, and I did that.