MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hi all,
I recently got a MiSTer and I already love this thing. Unfortunately I'm running into a bunch of issues getting started. Either I'm missing something obvious, or there is some kind of incompatibility with the SD card I am using.

Setup
- Fully assembled Mister - (DE 10-Nano, 128mb ram, IO board, usb hub)
- 512GB Samsung EVO Select Micro SD card (fully reformatted using official SD Card Formatter utility prior to use)
- Wired ethernet connection to home network

Background on issue
I looked up a bunch of tutorials on youtube and ?successfully? followed the Mr. Fusion process as outlined in the wiki - https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/mr-fusion - including running the update script and having all the cores installed. At the end of this, everyone in the youtube tutorials seems to have a nicely formatted SD card with all the core and game directories accessible directly from the SD card. I for some reason have 2 separate devices pop up when I insert my SD card - a "MRFUSION" drive of around 100mb with some .bin files and scripts and a generic USB Drive drive that I can't access without Windows prompting me to format it.

When the SD card is inserted into the MiSTer it seems to work fine. I can access all the cores and I even succesfully SFTP'd into it and added a couple of games to /media/fat/games/MegaCD to test it out. However, after successfully transferring some game folders over, for some reason the SFTP started throwing "no such file or directory" errors. The games that did transfer over work fine.

Questions

- Did the Mr. Fusion process work correctly for me? The wiki says that Mr. Fusion is supposed to re-size and re-partition the SD card during the MiSTer setup process but that doesn't seem to have happened for me? But also everything seems to work and I can still see all the folders when I SFTP into it?

- How do I access the games folder directly on Windows 10 seems the SFTP seems to not be working for me anymore?

Thanks for reading my wall of text - I really appreciate the help everyone!

Something is fishy: when inserted on a Windows PC the SD card should show up as only 1 drive.
I did some digging with one of my MISTer SD cards and ran Disk Management.
The card is a so called 64GB and has 2 partitions:
the first one is the MISTer partition of 59.47GB formatted exFAT, primary and healthy.
the 2nd one is just a healthy primary partition of 1MB.
Wanting to know more I fired Dispart:
The MISTer partition which shows up as the first partition in disk management is in reality partition 1 starting at 1048576 bytes.
The mystery partition which shows up as the second one in disk management is in reality partition 0 starting at 6386002534 bytes and is of type A2.
ID Occurrence Access Bootable Type Origin Supported by Description
A2h MBR CHS, LBA ARM Image Altera Cyclone V Hard Processor System (HPS) ARM preloader
You learn every day! But so far it makes sense.

In your case this is what I would do:
Check that the De10 nano supports 512GB cards. I only tested up to 128GB so I am not any help for that but I think it does supports them.
If it supports them I would check that it is a genuine card and for that this is what I would do but may be there are other ways:
Using Diskpart, which you must run as administrator, I would delete every partition, volume, ...from the card.
I would then use the SD consortium SD card formatter but not the Quick Format, the Overwrite Format. It will take a long time but it should tell you if it is really a 512GB card.
Or may be Mr. Fusion does not like 512GB cards.

I would also wait in order to get more feedback from others, in particular someone using successfully a 512GB card.
Good luck.

Thanks for the feedback and for confirming what a proper install is supposed to look like!

I actually used this card before with PSIO (PS1 Flashcart) so I know it is a genuine SD card. Before attempting the MiSTer setup i did actually do an Overwrite Format (which did indeed take forever) to make sure I have a clean install. I've heard of other products like the MiSTer having issues with the larger SDXC cards so maybe that's it. I'll try some other SD cards tomorrow to see if I can get it to work and will update with my findings in case anyone has a similar issue - I have a 400GB one and a couple of 128GB ones.

In the meantime if anyone else has any idea about what this could be let me know!

Thanks again

Oh my god I am a fucking idiot. I bought a "pre-configured" MiSTer bundle off of the MiSTer Addons website and didn't realize it came with a fully loaded SD card already installed in one of the SD slots. So basically what happened was that I flashed my 512GB SD card with Mr. Fusion, inserted it into the second SD slot on the IO board, and then nothing actually happened to it. The other card was 8GB which explains why the SFTP transfers stopped working (although I still feel it should have given a space error instead of the other one it gave me).

Live and learn