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After hours & hours of trying to get the SD card flash to work on the E3 I finally found a solution that worked (for me). This may work on non-E3 Bitmain asics, but YMMV

Original Instructions: https://support.bitmain.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008618093-How-to-upgrade-E3-firmware-via-SD-card (https://support.bitmain.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008618093-How-to-upgrade-E3-firmware-via-SD-card)

Note: These aren't the steps to perform, this is just more details & specifics about what's going on that Bitmain's instructions left out.

1. The Antminer E3 is super picky on which SD card you are using (2/3 of my 8gb cards were no good - Samsung worked). If you turn the power on with the SD card in (and jumper moved) and the front green & red LED lights are solid, most likely it doesn't like your card - try a different one.

2. Windows 7 / 10 was a problem (again for me - I'm sure people have got this to work in Windows). After countless formats between Windows 7 & Windows 10, I fired up a live CD of Fedora Linux, installed & ran gparted (you could just download a live cd of (https://gparted.org/livecd.php (https://gparted.org/livecd.php)) to do the same), removed all partitions and formatted to fat32.

3. Inside the E3-SD-20180806-pool.zip you need to copy the contents to the root of the SD card.

4. Once you have a supported card and files in the right place, once you power on the miner the green & red LEDs on the front of your control board (by the Ethernet port) will be off for about 10 seconds. They will blink once, then go back off. After another 10 ~ 20 seconds they will continuously blink to tell you the copy process to the main board has completed. At this point, power the miner down, take out the SD card and move the jumper back.

Let me know if this helps, I wasted a ton of time with their shoddy ass instructions. Their support just sends you in circles.

It does said "copy the contents":
The contents aren't originally inside of a folder (except for bin), I think the issue was your unzip app or the way you've unzipped it.
There are options like: "unzip to <zip file name>" and "unzip here", if you choose the first, it will make a folder and extract the contents inside it (your case); if you've chosen the latter, it will be extracted as the original position of the files (5/4 files and a bin folder).

But in behalf of half-witted newbies, thanks for the comprehensive guide ;)

My apologies, you are correct I mixed up those instructions with the t9+ recovery found here:

https://service.bitmain.com/support/download?product=Flashing%20SD%20card%20with%20image

I tried so many things I confused the two :-/.

The "t9+ -SD Tools.zip" found in the above link *does* have a folder in the zip, which is what I was referring to.

Will fix the OP.