About

About SD Card

SD card is short for Secure Digital card. It is a kind of memory card that comply with standards set by the SD Association. It is commonly used in portable electronic devices, such as digital cameras, mobiles, tablets, portable media players, and video game consoles.

Many people use SD cards to transfer data and store data in various portable devices. Nowadays SD card has become a widespread means of storing several gigabytes of data in a small size.

Recently some users reported that they can’t format SD cards on Android or Windows PC. Why can’t format SD card? How to resolve the issue and format SD card successfully? Don't worry. This article will tell you How to Format an SD Card and all the information you need.

Why Can’t Format SD Card

Normally SD cards can be formatted easily on Windows PC or Android, but you may encounter situations that you can’t format SD cards sometimes. The reasons are various, and most people report that they can’t format SD cards because of the following SD card issues.

• The SD card is write-protected.
• There are bad sectors on the SD card.
• The SD card gets infected with a virus.
• The SD card is corrupted due to file system errors.

If your SD card comes across the above issues, you may not be unable to format the SD card. Luckily there are the top 4 solutions to help you format SD cards in a Windows PC when you cannot format SD cards. The following contents will illustrate the 4 fixes with detailed steps and screenshots.

Solution 1. Remove Write Protection on SD Card

One of the reasons that you can’t format an SD card is that the SD card is set to read-only, namely the SD card is write-protected. In this case, all you need to do is to remove the write protection on the SD card on a Windows PC.

Step 1. Press Windows +R key at the same time to open the Run box. Input disk part and hit Enter.
Step 2. In the diskpart window, input the following commands and hit Enter after each one.

• list disk
• select disk * (* represents the disk that has the write-protected partition)
  
• attributes disk clear readonly

When it is completed and shows Diskpart attributes cleared successfully, you can close the window and check if the issue has been resolved.

Solution 2. Format SD Card with Third-party SD Card Formatter

If you are unable to format an SD card on Android or Windows PC, you can try using a reliable third-party SD card formatter. There are plenty of SD card formatting utilities on the Internet. Here I recommend you to use MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition, which is a free partition manager & SD card formatter.

It can help you not only format SD card but also manage SD card storage spaces with its features like extend partition, resize partition, space analyzer, and so on. You can also test your SD card with its Disk Benchmark feature or make a backup of the SD card with its Copy Disk feature.

All in all, MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition is very useful and worth trying. Read the following contents to learn more information about how to utilize this tool and format SD card.

Step 1. Download MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition by clicking the following button. Install it on your computer and launch it to get the main interface.

Step 2. On the main interface, select the partition on your SD card. Then choose Format Partition from the left action panel.

Step 3. Set partition label, file system, and cluster size on the pop-up window. Then click OK to continue.

Step 4. On the main interface, click Apply to allow the pending operations.

After it is finished, you have successfully formatted your SD card for free. With such an easy-to-use SD card formatter, you should fix the SD card won’t format issue without a hassle.

Solution 3. Format SD Card with CMD

CMD is also called cmd.exe or Command Prompt. It is the command-line interpreter in the OS/2, eComStation, Windows NT, Windows CE, and ReactOS operating systems. It is used to manage hard drives, check and fix drive errors, and resolve various system issues on your PC via commands.

How to launch CMD and format SD card with it? Here is the step-by-step tutorial.

Step 1. Input cmd in the Windows 10 Cortana search box and click the best match Command Prompt.

Step 2. Input Diskpart and hit Enter to open Diskpart.

Step 3. Then input the following commands and press Enter after each one. The following commands will perform a quick format on your SD card.

• list disk
• select disk * (* represents disk number)
• list partition
• select partition * (* represents partition number)
• format fs=ntfs quick
  

Solution 4. Format SD Card with Disk Management

Disk Management is a Windows built-in partition manager, which can help users simply manage disks and partitions. It was introduced with the Windows 2000 operating system and is supported in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10.

Disk Management can help you format partition, create a partition, delete partition, change drive letter, convert a basic disk to dynamic, and so on.
If you can’t format an SD card on Android, you can use Disk Management on a Windows PC to format an SD card.

Step 1. Right-click the Windows Start menu and select Disk Management to get the main interface or run diskmgmt.msc to open Disk Management.

Step 2. Choose the partition on the SD card that you want to format. Then right-click it and select Format.

Step 3. Specify the volume label, file system, and allocation unit size by yourself, and then click OK.

Step 4. Click OK to confirm that you want to format the SD card partition.

You see, it is not difficult to format SD cards with Disk Management. You can try this Windows built-in disk formatting utility to format SD cards when you encounter the situation that SD cards won't format android.

However, if you still can’t format an SD card, you can run anti-virus software to check whether your SD card is infected by the virus. Moreover, you may perform a surface test with MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition to check if the SD card is physically damaged.