SD Clean/Windows

This is an add-on section for completely recreating an SD card's filesystem using diskpart and Disk Management. This should only be done if formatting does not fix your issue or is not possible for some reason.

This page is for Windows users only. If you are not on Windows, see the Mac and/or Linux pages instead.

Instructions

Before beginning these steps, copy all of your SD card's contents to a folder on your computer.

1. Launch diskpart by searching for diskpart in the Windows search bar.
2. Once diskpart is active in the new Command Prompt window, type list disk.
3. Find your SD card in the list of disks (hint: look for the size of your card), then type select disk #, where # is the disk number of your SD card.
4. Type list disk again. You should now see a * next to your SD card.
5. Once you are absolutely sure that you have selected the right disk, type clean, then type convert mbr.
6. Close the diskpart window, and search for diskmgmt.msc in the windows search bar.
7. Once the disk management window loads, you should be able to see your SD card as a black 'unallocated' area in the bottom part of the window. You may have to scroll down the bottom part of the window to see it.
8. Right click on the black unallocated area and select new simple volume.
9. Click through all the prompts until you get to the one about formatting - there, select "FAT32" as the file system.
   • If the SD card is over 32GB in size, instead, select exFAT and then format the SD card to FAT32.
10. Once the format is complete, copy your data back onto the SD card.