A damaged or corrupted SD card can make you feel extremely frustrated. It may contain everything: from memories of a road trip or your favorite music tracks or professional data you can’t afford to lose. Malware, manhandling and scratches can make SD cards malfunction over a period of time. However, like all things tech, this problem can also be resolved quite easily.
Here, we have listed several ways to fix your damaged SD Card.
- Connect the SD card to any other computer and check if it works. If not, move on to the next step.
- Resolve the issue by using CMD –
- Connect SD card to your computer.
- Go to Start menu on your computer and type CMD in the search box to open Command Prompt.
- On the command window and type in “chkdsk” then your card’s drive letter, followed by a colon and /f
- Let’s say the SD card drive letter is H. The command would look like this:
- It would initiate the repair and stop the memory loss.
After following these steps, Windows might show you the message, “Windows has made corrections to the file system” in command prompt window. When the message appears, you can check if you can access the data on the card. If not, then move on to the next solution.
- Assign a New Drive letter –
Connect your SD card to your computer. As soon as the SD card is connected, the system will assign a drive letter to it. Sometimes, even if the reader has assigned a drive letter, you get a message “Please insert the disk into drive E:” indicating that it isn’t reading the card. So, assigning a new drive letter to the connected card can be a solution to it. Follow these steps to assign the drive letter:
- Go to Start Button and navigate to Control Panel.
- On Control Panel page, Click on ‘View By’ and select ‘Large icons’.
- Double-click Administrative Tools.
- Click on Computer Management.
- On Computer Management pane, click on Disk Management
Note: To open Disk Management, you can also press Windows and R key together and type diskmgmt.msc.
- You will see all the partitions on the system along with the connected card.
- Right click on the drive’s name that you want to change.
- Select Change Drive Letter and Paths
Click on Change and Rename.
- Click on Yes to save the changes.
- Format your SD card – This might make you lose your data but chances are the card would be accessible.
- Reinstall the driver – To reinstall the driver, follow these steps:
- Go to My Computer.
- Right click on My Computer.
- Click on Manage option
- Click on Device Manager option on the left side pane.
- Double-Click Disk drives option from the list, then right click on your connected card.
- Click on Uninstall and click on OK.
- Disconnect SD card and restart your computer.
- Reconnect your SD card again. Your computer will detect it.
- Using a Third-Party Application
If none of these do the trick, try using a third-party application to recover the data and repair the damage.
Try these methods, before discarding the memory card. You might just salvage it.
Want solutions to more such everyday tech debacles? Let us know your problem in the comments below and we’ll resolve it for you.
Also Read: How to Increase Virtual Memory in Windows 7