Workbench

Formatting a Cheap Generic MicroSD Card For the Digitech Trio+

I purchased a couple of cheap no-name MicroSD cards for use with my Trio+ pedal. According to the manual, the Trio+ should automatically handle formatting a new card when powered on, but I was getting the flashing red Part LEDs that indicate a problem with the media.

Checking the format of a known good card

I mounted[1] the Trio+ card I was already using in MacOS and ran diskutil list, which revealed:

/dev/disk4 (internal, physical):
 #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
 0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *7.9 GB     disk4
 1:                 DOS_FAT_32 TRIOPLUS                7.9 GB     disk4s1

Checking the format of the new card

diskutil list showed a couple of differences:

/dev/disk4 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *7.8 GB     disk4
   1:             Windows_FAT_32 NO NAME                 7.8 GB     disk4s1

From what I understand, diskutil on MacOS supports a single FAT32 filesystem type, and DOS_FAT_32 and Windows_FAT_32 are both aliases for it. (I have no idea why diskutil read the two different cards differently.)

Reformatting the new card

Making EXTRA SURE that I was using the new empty card and not my old one with a bunch of song data on it, I ran:

diskutil erasevolume FAT32 "TRIOPLUS" disk4s1

after which diskutil list displayed:

/dev/disk4 (internal, physical):
 #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
 0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *7.8 GB     disk4
 1:                 DOS_FAT_32 TRIOPLUS                7.8 GB     disk4s1

When I put the freshly formatted card into the Trio+ and powered it on, the card mounted as expected: the 'Part' lights came on in an a sequential amber pattern for a few moments and then the pedal finished booting as normal.

  1. Make sure your full-size SD card adapter works; the cheap no-name card came with one, but when I tried using it MacOS didn't see it at all. I switched to a Sandisk adapter I had lying around and that worked. ↩︎

Wed May 13 2026 20:00:00 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)