SD Card has wrong capacity

[AndyM]

After flashing an OS to my 16GB micro SD I find that it erroneously reports in, for example, parted as 4GB.

Code:

$ lsblk
NAME  MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:0    0 465.8G  0 disk
├─sda1  8:1    0    2M  0 part
├─sda2  8:2    0  39.1G  0 part /
├─sda3  8:3    0  7.8G  0 part [SWAP]
└─sda4  8:4    0 418.9G  0 part /home
sdb      8:16  1    15G  0 disk
└─sdb1  8:17  1    15G  0 part

Code:

$ sudo parted /dev/sdb
GNU Parted 3.6
Using /dev/sdb
[menu]
(parted) print all                                                       
Model:  (file)
Disk /dev/sdb: 4092MB

I have googled endlessly but cannot find a way of fixing this.
I would like to use the 16GB SD card for data.

Any help would be appreciated as usual.

[Zebulon Walton]

Are you sure it's actually 16GB capacity? There are a lot of phony flash drives and SD cards around, though usually higher reported capacities. (You buy a "64GB" card and find out it will only hold 4GB, etc.)

There is testing software out there to check actual physical capacity, such as this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UihP7jqB7U

[AndyM]

Absolutely certain. I have five and only one now shows as 16GB.

[zetabeta]

i need run some tests before i give final comment.

generally speaking pre-written images are smaller, and they have to be smaller than whatevery memory. and first boot expands into full size, (although fedora on pinephone seems to require manual expansion). so id you check memory card after writing, then fdisk, parted and others may report that small size.

[Kevin Kofler]

There is testing software out there to check actual physical capacity, such as this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UihP7jqB7U

Or this: https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ which is cross-platform Free Software, whereas the one shown in your video appears to be proprietary Windows-only free(as in beer)ware (at least I do not see any source code download).

[Zebulon Walton]

Or this: https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ which is cross-platform Free Software, whereas the one shown in your video appears to be proprietary Windows-only free(as in beer)ware (at least I do not see any source code download).

Good catch! Admittedly I just did a quick search for capacity testing software and didn't take a close look at it.

[AndyM]

Not sure what went wrong, but after a reboot of the PC all the SD cards reported their correct sizes.

Thanks for the replies.

[zetabeta]

might be related. i noticed a bug with jumpdrive. however bug seems to be in a host system in linux system. some cases sizes go wrong in a way that system reports wrong size for mass media. i think it happens after "eject" command. removind and re-inserting the memory won't help. only reboot helps.

[AndyM]

Sounds exactly the same problem.

[KNERD]

Images you write to an SD card are a fixed size. The image has to be resized after the image is put on the SD card.