Corrupt sd card

I hope you can help.

I appear to have a corrupt 4GB sd card that will only auto mount as read only (some of the file names are very strange and the physical lock on the card is in the off position).

Even as root, I'm unable to change any of the file attributes on the card. In the past I've just reformatted the card using gparted but even this has failed (error messages but I don't know where gparted logs these).

How do I recover the card? Is there a way of forcing the card to mount (not as read only) so I can reformat it?

 

On corrupted hard drives, I've had better luck recovering them with fdisk or cfdisk than gparted or other gui tools, so you might want to give one of those a try with your SD card. Another option is to try a mac or windows machine to format it and if that works then you can format it again under Linux.

I got a brand new 2GB SD, which I formatted with swap, /tmp and /var/log partitions and now Gparted doesn't even see them even though Linux is still using them. I'm thinking that SD cards just don't like to have more than a single partition on them.

 

Thanks .... I've tried to use gparted, fdisk and cfdisk ...... I always get the same error message -

Failed to mount "/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_part2_size_3999784960"
Given device "/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_part2_size_3999784960" is not a volume or drive

Any ideas what is wrong?

 

I think that is because you have the swap partition on the SD card. I found (on other computers) that sometimes an external swap partition is not seen by Gparted unless you use swapon which may need to be done with the terminal to make it work. Further in my experience once you have swapon turned on and the SD card or USB stick seen if you leave it like that then it will continue to be seen until you use swapoff.

 

Do you have access to a Mac or windows PC? (That might work). Or a digital camera that can format SD cards? (less likely to work).

 

Windows didn't want to know BUT my canon camera reformatted the drive just fine.
THANKYOU ....... you're a genius!

 

Not a genius -- I just break so much stuff that I have to learn to fix it.

Another thing I forgot to mention is that some SD manufacturers' web sites may have utilities you can download that can reformat a card. As a last resort, check your warranty -- you may be able to send your bad card back to have it fixed or replaced.

 

Thanks for this, my Fuji camera performed the same trick

 

This Panasonic formatting software worked well for me when neither my PC or camera would even recognise the SD card.
Here is the link,

http://panasonic.jp/support/global/cs/s ... atter.html