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A while ago when SDHC cards were fairly new and all the office computers had only SD card readers I made a 4 gig Class 6 A Data SDHC unreadable and unformattable by trying to get it to work in SD card readers.

I'm wondering if since that time methods have emerged to make such SDHC cards usable again? Perhaps using low-level interactions with the logic on the cards?

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3 Answers

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You may be able to use the SD Formatter 3.0 from the SD Association to resurrect your card using a compatible card reader.

If that still doesn't work, it appears from the page linked above that you may have corrupted the "protected area" secure part of the card's filesystem. It is possible that running the card through a "format" or "initialize" function present on another SDHC compatible device (like a camera or media device of some sort) might do the trick.

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Well it didn't work for me since the computers I tried it on were busy looping trying to identify if there was even something in the port or not. I guess this means that for now the card is still not salvageable since SD Formatter does seem to be the ultimate official tool. – hippietrail May 17 '11 at 15:12
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Sangy has pretty much covered the different types of SD cards in use today. I have resurrected SDHC cards in the past via formatting in a Nokia E63 phone! Yep! That's the ONLY way I was able to save the 8 GB card! Windows would not even recognize it. Even RMPrepUSB (a great formatting program to use on USB/flash drives) would not recognize it. But my old cell phone would! And, it formatted it with no problem to boot!!!

I NEVER, NEVER throw away any old phones. When I bought my new iPhone (which I really couldn't live without), I replaced a Nokia E63 (a problematic phone) and a Samsung Blackjack. Both of these phones accept SDHC cards. So I use them instead of buying a memory card reader. I do have a memory card reader but, like Sangy above posted, it doesn't read anything with over 2 GB of memory. Enter the old phones to the rescue. Don't throw away those old phones!

I hope this helps...

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There are two type of SD cards available in the market i.e SD and SDHC. The size limit of the SD card is 2 GB. Some companies offers SD card of 4 GB limit but unfortunately not all equipment can read the 4 GB SD card. In the SDHC card the size limit is raised by 32 GB. Unfortunately old equipment designed for the SD card cannot read the SDHC card. Use 2 Gb cards for your work. I do not know for sure, but a 4 Gig data used in a SD card may be part of the trouble you are having. If you want to recover your data from the card you can use the data recovery software which can recover your data easily without any further loss.

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