With demos now available on the 3DS eShop, it’s likely your original 2GB SD card will become a bit full, if it hasn’t done already. I found myself in this position today. Thankfully, I had a spare 4GB to “upgrade” to.
You can, of course, just swap your old card for your new one, but then any pictures you’ve taken and games you’ve downloaded and “extra data” and stuff won’t be on there unless you swap cards again. And we all know that swapping SD cards is the worst of all First World Problems.
Using this method, you can transfer everything from your old card onto your new card:
- Mount your old card on your computer.
- Create a folder on your computer and copy EVERYTHING from the card to it.
- While it’s doing that, put your new card in your 3DS and turn the 3DS on. It’ll initialise the card for you.
- When both these have finished, mount the new card in your computer.
- Open the folder you made on your computer, and copy everything to the root of the new card. If you’re asked to overwrite folders, or merge folders, say “yes”.
- When the copying has finished, you’re almost there. Next, on the new card, open the folder called “Nintendo 3DS”. Inside there will be folder with a huge string of letters and numbers for the name – open that.
- Inside that folder will be two folders with long random names. One of these is the folder tied to your old card, the other is the one tied to your new card. Simply copy the contents (not the folder itself) of the old one (it’ll be the one with the larger filesize) into the other one – merging and overwriting again if necessary.
- Put the new card back in your 3DS, reboot it if necessary, and you’re away!
Sometimes there are things that just need to escape my head.
Thanks. This is the only way my SanDisk ULTRA 8GB class6 transferred from my original. It would work on my 3DS but not hold the pics, music & all the games doing it the Nintendo.com way. Even with the Nintendo Support 800# they just read off what wasn’t working on the Nintendo web site. Glad I found this article, I was about to buy a dif SD card.
ow man, I just considered how your tutorial work if the system is had formatting..??!
I just follow your tutorial. any step is done, but it never work. and I remembered that my system has been formated. ow man, I dunno how to make it work. I have a plenty $20 I purchased from e-Shop..
help .. T__T
Thank you for the tutorial. I did like it say and it it work perfect.
Nintendo itself just says on their site to copy everything from the old SD card directly to the new one, no “initialitizing” of the new one first or copying between folders. Is there a benefit to using the method on this site?
Hi Miguel,
Yes – this method allows everything to work. If you use the “Nintendo method”, sometimes some of your photos, videos, game extra data, downloaded content or settings are not carried across.
Well, they are, but they’re not accessible.
Ah I see, thank you. I was just worried this could cause performance issues or something. I just got a 16GB card and tried this method, and it works like a charm!
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Thanks for posting these directions. It worked perfectly! We were talking about upgrading 3DS memory cards on the Video Game Hangover podcast and one of my co-hosts mentioned your tutorial.
So I see! I saw the pingback
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worked like a charm, thank you =)
I did everything on this and couldn’t get it to work please help!
The card formats fine by the 3DS it is a samsung 16gb Class 10