Those who use SD card in Camera or smartphone, most of the time face this problem. No worries! It’s not that difficult to fix a SD card that that is not showing or detecting and forcing to format the SD Card against your will.
There are few reasons why SD card sometime doesn’t show up. Most of the time, we take out the SD card from the card slot without ejecting from the computer. It damages the SD card and gets corrupted if not properly ejected. Then next time, you insert, it doesn’t show! so, it is wise to eject the SD card from the computer before taking it out. The easiest way to repair a not reading SD card is trying another USB port or change the adaptor/card reader! If still doesn’t work, you can follow these 3 methods to repair your SD card.
Method 1: Reinstall the SD card reader driver
Most of the time SD card issues are not caused by SD cards— but they are caused by SD card readers and their drivers. That’s why you need to first verify that your SD card reader is working correctly by inserting another SD card into it. If you discover that it isn’t, reinstall its drivers:
- Press Windows + X.
- Select Device Manager.
- Select your SD card reader under Disk drives.
- Open the Action menu and choose Update driver.
Method 2: Assign a new drive letter to the SD card
If you can’t access an SD card on a Windows PC then assign the SD card with a unique drive letter. even though Windows is supposed to assign drive letters to storage devices automatically, but sometime they don’t always go according to plan. Even if when they do, simply changing the drive letter to a different one is sometimes enough for Windows to recognize an SD card. To manually assign a new drive letter to your SD card:
- Press Windows + X.
- Select Disk Management.
- Right-click your SD card reader and select the Change Drive Letter and Paths option.
4. Pick a new drive letter and confirm.
Method 3: Use CHKDSK to repair SD card corruption
CHKDSK is a very useful command-line tool that can automatically repair many file system errors to make a corrupted SD card usable again. Last time, when I my friend’s SD card had the same issue of not showing and reading, I followed this CHKDSK command-line and he got back more than 3000 photos from his DSLR camera! You can do it yourself if you exactly follow the command-line and save thousands of photos or other files without formatting the SD card.
- Press Windows + X.
- Select Windows PowerShell (Admin).
- Enter the following command (make sure to replace X with the letter assigned to your SD card) and press Enter: chkdsk X: /R
4. Wait for CHKDSK to finish. the process may take sometimes, depending on the size and speed of your SD card.
The /R parameter tells CHKDSK to check the SD card for bad sectors and repair them without losing any files.
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