URGENT Help Required

[sidoz]

Hi Guys, I recently bought a San disk 1 GB SD card and it was working ok and showing 1 GB capacity ..but i inadvertently formatted the same while it was in my MP4 player ( incidentallly after this i figured out that the mp4 player can only have 512 in-built memory , though the SD slot can have a 1 GB card)... Once i formatted the same through this MP 4 player, pooooof ! the card size reduced to 512 MB !!!! can you belive it .. it just formatted 512 MB and my capcpity has been reduced by Half !! ...

I saw an FAQ on san disk side which suggested to run Fdisk .. .but i dont know hwo to do tyhat under windows .. i am using XP . So please guys can you help me recover the lost space and make my 1 GB card 1 GB again.. it cost quite a packet !

Look forward to your help please.

[David Metsky]

Have you tried reformatting the card in your camera?

-dave-

[sidoz]

Yes David, I have !! Same result .. i have tried many things .. including formatting it is my PC thru a card reader ( incidentally it formats an dthen says "windows cannot format " at the end) .. also formatting through my Pocket PC but to no avail ... please help me

[Kenyada]

Have you tried to use the "scan disk" or "defragment" functions of Windows to recapture the lost sectors?

[sidoz]

Hi Kenyada, yes I have tried that oen as well !! it juts scans for 512 MB of memory for the lost sectors and reports there are none !!! As i said one of the options on the san disk site asks one to do "fdisk" on the card .. the point is I dont knwohow to do "fdisk" on the card .. windows does not recognize this and i trie dgoing through the "disk managment " function of windows !!

[Kenyada]

Hi Sidoz. I've looked online and can't seem to find the definitive solution to your problem. (I still think that there must be a way) There are thousands of Googled websites and comments, but of those I checked... nothing. I think it must have something to do with removing the existing 512MB partition and reconfiguring it. The question is, at what point do you take a chance of ruining the entire disk? Choose wisely

[Rhys]

Hi Guys, I recently bought a San disk 1 GB SD card and it was working ok and showing 1 GB capacity ..but i inadvertently formatted the same while it was in my MP4 player ( incidentallly after this i figured out that the mp4 player can only have 512 in-built memory , though the SD slot can have a 1 GB card)... Once i formatted the same through this MP 4 player, pooooof ! the card size reduced to 512 MB !!!! can you belive it .. it just formatted 512 MB and my capcpity has been reduced by Half !! ...

I saw an FAQ on san disk side which suggested to run Fdisk .. .but i dont know hwo to do tyhat under windows .. i am using XP . So please guys can you help me recover the lost space and make my 1 GB card 1 GB again.. it cost quite a packet !

Look forward to your help please.

I think you'll find that it has been formatted to FAT 8. FAT 8 tops out at 512MB. FAT 16 tops out at either 2 of 4 GB. FAT 32 tops out at about 40GB.

FDisk is simple enough to use. Drop down into DOS, type fdisk and follow the menus. FDISK is menu-driven.

[FBergeron]

It's probably too late but it may be of help to someone else...

I had the same problem with a SanDisk SD Card Ultra II. Using fdisk didn't help. However, cfdisk did it! So, here is what I did. (Please note that the device is most probably different on your environment) :

cfdisk /dev/sdb

In the graphical text interface, I did the following operations :

1. Delete partition
2. Create a new primary partition (as large as possible)
3. Set the partition type to FAT16 (06 is the number to enter)
4. Write the partition table
5. Quit

After that, I created the file system with :

mkfs.dos /dev/sdb1

That's it. It worked for me. I hope it will do the same for you.

[josh81_5]

Alright I'm having this same problem with my 2GB card (formatted at 990MB). I was wondering how I open cfdisk so that I can follow these steps. I tried using sandisks selfhelp but that was of little help. Thanks