I had to flash the firmware of an old Creality Ender 6 I bought second hand. The display board has a very specific requirement to allow flashing with the infamous DWIN_SET folder: the SD card has to be formatted in FAT32 with a 4096 allocation unit size 4096 or it will not work.
If you have an SD card which is 8GB or less, this is not a problem.
- Connect the SD to your Windows PC
- Right click on the drive letter with the SD card reader
- Select “Format” so the dialog window pops up
- Under File System: select FAT32
- Under Allocation unit size: select 4096 bytes
- Click Start
However, if your SD card is bigger than 8GB you may find an ugly surprise: the minimum allocation unit size in the list is 8192. In my example, I had a 32GB SD card and I did not want to waste time buying a new smaller card.
The workaround is simple. Create a partition in the SD card which is smaller than 8GB.
- Open the “Disk Management” tool
- Find the “Disk” where the SD card is located
- Right click on the Volume
- Select “Delete Volume”. This will remove the current partition (in my case, the 32GB partition)
- Right click on the Volume again
- Select “New Simple Volume”
- Choose a size which is less than 8GB. I selected a size which was even less than 4GB just to be extra sure. This will create your new smaller partition. The rest of the space will remain as “unallocated”.
- Now you can format the new partition with the 4096 allocation size.
This allowed me to format the small partition in the smaller allocation unit size and I was able to flash the firmware as I needed.
When you want to have your SD card back to “normal” you can go to the Disk Management utility and delete the small partition so all the SD card space will be “unallocated”, finally, create a new partition using the whole available space in the card.
The display was showing 0 files copied because of wrong allocation unit size in my SD card