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Restoring an SD Card to normal format


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I've got an SD Card that I formatted with Image Writer for Windows to install MeeGo on a netbook, and would like to now use the card as a regular one again. Windows doesn't detect anything in the card, although it will recognise removable storage. What program would I use to format it and bring it back to a regular FAT16/32?

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Hello,

The SD Association, which is the industry trade group for SD card manufacturers, offers a tool called the SD Formatter on their web site.

You might want to try using it to re-format the SD Card. I have had good results formatting problematic SD Cards with it.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

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Shouldn't an SD card be formatted as ExFAT? FAT16 is DOS ancient and FAT32 can't store more than 4GB in one file.

Well, it depends on what you will be using it with. If you are planning on using it with an MP3 player or camera, it's highly likely that it will only support FAT or FAT32. For that matter, the OP didn't even mention what size card he was talking about, so the FAT32 size limits might be moot.

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Well, it depends on what you will be using it with. If you are planning on using it with an MP3 player or camera, it's highly likely that it will only support FAT or FAT32. For that matter, the OP didn't even mention what size card he was talking about, so the FAT32 size limits might be moot.

Isn't FAT16 limited to the DOS 8.3 format anyways? 8 letter uppercase characters with a 3 letter uppercase extension?

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well whatever the cards format it should be left alone or if something happens then restore it to the format that it was in or it may not work as intended.

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Anyone got any experiance with passworded micro-SD cards?

I had one that a phone just decided to password for no reason, couldn't find the password anywhere and nothing picks the bloody thing up, phones do by want a pin.

Might have thrown the thing out.

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Isn't FAT16 limited to the DOS 8.3 format anyways? 8 letter uppercase characters with a 3 letter uppercase extension?

No. You can still store long filenames in FAT16. FAT32 wasn't introduced until Windows 95 OSR2 was released, yet the original version of 95 supported long filenames. Technically, at the DOS level (real DOS, not a command prompt), you will only ever see the 8.3 names anyway.

well whatever the cards format it should be left alone or if something happens then restore it to the format that it was in or it may not work as intended.

What in the hell are you talking about? You can format an SD card (or any type of storage for that matter) in any file system you want, you aren't limited to what it originally shipped with. That's the same kind of nonsense someone tried to convince me of years ago when they insisted that formatting a flash drive in HFS+ would permanently damage it.

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Go to Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management - Disk Management. You can then delete/format the drive as you wish.

Actually that did not work with my 4 Gb SD card which only reported 39 mb. However it did show the correct size and the problem. The problem is that a primary partition was made of 39 Mb and the rest is in two other partitions, one unallocated and I forget the other.

However the format command will not allow me to format to Fat32 which is the problem. So I am looking for a better fix.

Unless I missed something in your suggestion?

Charles

http://doc-computer.blogspot.com

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I've got an SD Card that I formatted with Image Writer for Windows to install MeeGo on a netbook, and would like to now use the card as a regular one again. Windows doesn't detect anything in the card, although it will recognise removable storage. What program would I use to format it and bring it back to a regular FAT16/32?

I discovered the problem. The Autonooter used to change my Nook Color into an android tablet formatted the SD card as Fat16. So I simply used Easeus Partition manager [free when I last checked] and DELETED the partitions which were incorrect. Then I CREATED a partition using Fat32 which gave me my 4 Gb card back.

Charles

http://doc-computer.blogspot.com

http://doc-computer.com

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