SD card bricked!

[shbris]

everyone knows that moment when they're playing with one of their toys and they break it, just like ".....AAAAAAAAAAGH"

just got a brand new SD card, 4GB sandisk extreme III sdhc

put it into my dell mini 9, formatted it (as you do) and my laptop went to sleep half way through and now it's bloody bricked and won't read in any camera or computer in my house

grr

any ideas to fix, or cut my losses? i need a card by saturday cos i'm going skiing!!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

This may help:

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum...fm/510415.html

I would probably buy a new card pronto TBH using express delivery or even get a new one from a shop.

[peterb]

Given the urgency, I'd do what Cat-the-fifth (CTF) suggests - get a replacement now, and then worry about resurrecting the old one (why did you need to format it - usually they are ready formatted)

SD cards are unusual and I have had similar problems - although I have not gone into the reasons why in any great depth.

Formatting usually means creating a file system - FAT16, Fat 32 NTFS or whatever, and most flash cards are preformatted to one of the FAT file systems. The exception is formatting floppy discs, which really does lay down the low level disc structure, , the sector markers and sector numbering, but that is not true of hard drives.

A flash device does have an embedded controller in it which takes care of reading and writing. The actually physical layout is hidden, but that doesn't matter as long as the interface presents a logical structure that the operting system understands.

SD is unusual because of the secure properties, whether or not they are actually implemented on card with the SD physical format. There are specific utilities that will format SD cards - you might try Googling to see if you can find one (try the SD card association). My speculation (and it is only speculation) is that it is that which causes the difficulty, and interrupting the power to the SD card caused the problem.

In general it is better to format the cards on the deviced that they will be used in - if its a camera, use that to format it.

'Hope that helps longer term, but meanwhile - buy a replacement.

[DDY]

Try the HP format tool, it has resurrected a few of my MS and SD cards, even Sony tech support recommended it to me once.

[shbris]

yeh ordered a new one express delivery. tried the HP and the SD formatting tools, neither detected it even though diskpart shows it as a disk, and my data recovery tool can detect it. really frustrating, especially as it works now in a camera, just won't work in my computer

[shbris]

and yeh not really sure why i formatted it to start with, kinda natural reaction to getting new storage, won't bloody do it again that's for sure!

[atmadden]

This is a common problem with shdc cards of 4gb and over. I have just bought a microsd 8 gb card for my samsung omnia. It will work in the phone but not on my laptop or pc. Strange thing is I can plug phone in latop via usb cable and and it will read it but no go with sd adapter or reader.