Blue 50g in Germany at 70 EUR

[matthiaspaul]

The HP 50g firmware 2.15 supports SDSC and MMC flash cards including miniSD, microSD and TransFlash cards up to 2 GB formatted as FAT12, FAT16, FAT16B, or FAT32 in general, but the built-in formatter and the size display in the filer is limited to 1 GB maximum.

According to some reports I have seen, the old 1.xx firmware did not support FAT32, and some early 2.xx firmware versions (which versions exactly?) did not support FAT12 until it was added again. So, if you want to upgrade the firmware use a FAT16B formatted card just to be safe, afterwards all four filesystem variants can be used.

SDHC and SDXC cards including their mini and micro variants are not supported.

FAT32+, FAT32B and exFAT filesystems are not supported as well, neither are hidden or secured FAT12, FAT16, FAT16B or FAT32 filesystems (however, this is not a shortcoming).

The optional VFAT layer to support long filenames in any of these filesystems is unsupported as well.

So far I have only tested cards configured as removable drives with one primary partition, with standard logical geometries, and with a sector size of 512 bytes. I assume that superfloppy configurations work as well (they should), but I haven't tested them myself. Also, I don't know if the calculator is able to correctly cope with cards with more than one primary partition, or with logical drives in extended partition, or with logical sector sizes different from 512 bytes.

I wished the calculator's firmware would be open source, so that this could be checked formally and possible shortcomings fixed.

Hope it helps,

Matthias