Bizarre SD card behaviour

[AKM]

I got this craptastic MP3 SD card player to put some music on it.
I turned it on, and there was some American 60s music on it.
Plugged it via mini USB cable to PC, nothing happens.
Took out the 2GB SD card and put it into an Orico card reader/USB hub, it is empty.
Put some music on it, put it back in the player, only the 60s music can be played.
Put my SD card from my old Nokia phone, it plays music from the card like it should.
Do a quick format (FAT) on the bizarre SD card on the PC, put it back in the player, again only the 60s music can be played.
Put the bizarre SD card into the old Nokia phone, it says only 1 GB and has a lot of folders with unintelligible folder names.
Do a normal format (FAT) on the PC, put it back into the player, no more 60s music.
Put some music on it (mixed 128kbps, 320kbps, V0 MP3 files), nothing plays.
Put the bizarre SD card into an LG phone, it sees and plays the songs normally.
Copy a 1.6GB movie onto the bizarre SD card, movie plays normally on the PC.
Test the bizarre SD card with ChkFlsh, PASS.
Put the bizarre SD card into the old Nokia phone, won`t open it, just initializes it indefinitely. But shows 1GB total size, with ~800MB used, 1GB free.
Format the bizarre SD card on the old Nokia phone, it now sees 1.86GB total size, 1.86GB free.
Put some music on it and into the mp3 player. It works like it should.
Do a normal format (FAT) on the PC, put some music and put it back into the player; everything works normally.
WTF?

[SaabFAN]

Maybe it is a fake card, reporting more memory than acutally available, or just a crappy controller inside of it.

[AKM]

The size is alright, 2GB(1.86GB).
I copied a 1.6GB movie on it and played back without any problems.
It passed Check Flash 1.16 test without any problems.

My biggest question is why did the format on the old phone fix the issue, but format on the PC didn’t. If I format it now on the PC, it works.

[dexters_lab]

IIRC windows obfuscates the partition information on flash media like that

i've had problems before with windows not formatting flash cards & usb drives properly

[botcrusher]

The official SD card flashing utility normally does it right on the first try, on mobile so i don't have a link right now. A quick google will find it for any future craptastic sd cards

[CJay]

I've had weirdness where a card wouldn't format in a PC to full capacity using Windows or the SD association formatter (even with size adjust, diskpart etc.)

The quickest way to get around it was to drop it into a digital camera and format it in that, full capacity and readable afterwards