Member Avatar for humorousone

I'm having a bit of trouble here.
This could be hardware related (as i'm using a new microsd to sd adapter), but I'm not sure.

So, I installed rasbpian on a microSD card a while back (a few weeks), and now i'm finished with it.
I'm trying to completely reformat it for use on my phone. I can't use my phone to format it because it only detects the first partition, the recovery partition, which is about 800MB.

So, i've got an SD card reader, and a MicroSD to SD adapter which is currently plugged into my PC.

The SD card appears on my devices list (screencap), but no volume information is avaliable, and I can't access the card at all (screencap).

I can't manage the device via command prompt or windows device manager either, although in the device manager it does provide correct information about the size of the disk.

I'm using kaspersky antivirus.

Before you ask: yes, the lock switch on the card is in the off position.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by rubberman
Member Avatar for Slavi

It seems like that your SD card hasn't been assigned a letter. You' ll have to do it manually in the device manager (say you want to assign it 'f' but I think windows requires you to use unused character). Another option would be to get liveusb of ubuntu or similiar and format your sdcard using gparted from within ubuntu

Member Avatar for humorousone

Ok.
Reassigning the drive letter didn't work, and neither did the SD formatter.

With the SD formatter, it says 'this drive is not supported', and through diskpart the card is listed as 'unusable'

Member Avatar for rubberman

Boot a live linux CD/DVD/USB drive and you can reformat/erase the device without any problem. To erase the drive completely, use the command (assume the SD card is /dev/sdb) "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M". That will happily zero out the entire device, in 1MB increments. Of course, it is easier to just erase the boot sector and partition table with the command "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb count=1". That would take about 0 seconds... And will not force the TRIM service to wear level the rest of the drive, which is a BIG issue for SD cards and USB thumb drives.

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