How to Fix Can't Format SD Card Error?

Steps to Recover Data from SD Card showing Cannot format Error

1. Download and install Remo Recover and click on the SD card showing can’t format error and hit the Scan button
Note – If your SD card is not detected, click on the Can’t find the drive to locate your corrupt SD card

2. The tool will initiate Quick Scan automatically, followed by Deep Scan. You can click on Dynamic Recovery View to find the files being restored during the scanning process.
3. Once the scanning is completed, go to the Lost Partition folder, select the files you wish to recover from the SD card showing can’t format error, and hit Recover

Methods to fix SD Card Cannot format Error on Windows 11/10/8/7

As previously mentioned, two main reasons for this error are write-protected SD cards and Severely damaged SD cards. The following are instructions on how to fix this error.

A) Unlock the Micro SD Card

A micro SD card is locked is one of the terminologies used for a write-protected SD Card. As discussed earlier, when a micro SD card is locked or write-protected, you cannot make any changes since it works in read-only mode. You can disable the write protection on the SD card to fix the error.

An SD card can be severely damaged due to

• High-level bad sectors (Here you can know more about uncorrectable sectors)
• Severe virus infection

The best method to fix an SD card that won’t format is by force formatting the SD card using CMD.

B) How to Force Format an SD Card?

As you know, formatting an SD card erases all your data. Make sure you take a backup or restore photos from SanDisk SD card to a safe location to avoid data loss, and then follow the below command to force format an SD card.

Open Command Prompt by right-clicking Start > Command Prompt (Admin) or search cmd from Start.

• Type: diskpart to bring up DiskPart utility.

• Type: list disk and hit Enter
• Type: select disk 1 and hit Enter (Replace 1 with the drive number of your SD card)

• Type: clean and hit Enter

• Type: create partition primary and hit Enter
• Type: select disk 1 and hit Enter (Replace 1 with the drive number of SD card)

• Type: active to make the SD card partition activate
• Type: format fs = NTFS or format fs = fat32 and hit Enter

• Type: assign letter = F
• After this, type exit to finish the process.

After forcefully formatting the SD card, you need to fix the bad sectors using the CHKDSK tool.

C) CHKDSK Format SD card

CHKDSK is one of the most prominent utilities on Windows that will help you fix all the bad sectors that exist on your SD card. The following are the instructions on how to do it.

• Right-click on Start to select Command Prompt (Admin) or click Start and type: cmd > click exe to bring up Command Prompt.
• Sign in as an administrator and type: chkdsk E: /f /r and hit Enter; (Replace E: with the drive letter of your SanDisk SD card).
• Wait for the process to complete (Process time might vary based on the size of the SD card).
• Exit CMD and enter Disk Management tool, find the SD card, right-click on it, and select Format volume.
• Reset the file system and drive letter of the SD card, and click OK to confirm the format action.

Both the aforementioned methods can be used on all brands of SD cards, such as SanDisk, Sony, Kingston, Transcend, etc. It also works on all formats of SD cards, such as Micro SD, SD, SDHC, and SDXC.

Conclusion:

Hopefully, using the above methods, you might have fixed unable to format error on your SD card. Make sure you take a regular of your SD card data to avoid any data loss due to uncertain errors. Finally, if you cannot fix the error, it means that your SD card is unfixable. If your SD card is still under warranty, better contact the brand, and claim to exchange the memory card. But don’t forget to recover your data from the SD card using reliable data recovery software before exchanging it.