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Recently, my micro SD card stopped showing up in Explorer on my Surface pro 6. I opened the Disk Management tool and the disk does get recognized (as Disk 1 below), but the main partition does not have a letter, and I can not access its properties or do any changes to it.

I did not do anything to the SD card and have no idea how the letter (D:/) disappeared from it. I have many important files on it.

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when I right click on the Disk 1 label and click "Change Drive letter and paths", it gives me this message:

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I tried removing the device and reinserting it, and restarting my computer, nothing works. Is there a way to restore it?

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  • Do you have any other devices you could try inserting the SD card into?
    – Tim G.
    May 7, 2020 at 1:16
  • @TimG. Yes, I tried another computer and had the same result
    – Victor2748
    May 7, 2020 at 3:24
  • 2
    Golden Rule: Never entrust the only copy of any data to something so delicate as an SD card. They have a stupendously high fail-rate. If the data on it was truly valuable, stop messing with it & send it to a data recovery professional. If not, then just bin it & get a new one. They're not worth fighting once they start to play up.
    – Tetsujin
    May 7, 2020 at 5:59
  • Neither of the partitions on your Sd card have a filesystem. Either your card has failed, which would not be a surprise at all, or you have accidentally wiped it somehow. If formatting doesn't fix it then you should throw it out and get a new one. As Tetsujin says you should never have anything you can't afford to lose on an SD card.
    – Mokubai ♦
    May 7, 2020 at 7:29
  • Any followup? I've discovered this on some Sandisk cards- all 'authentic' which I'm now starting to doubt.
    – J.Hirsch
    Dec 5, 2020 at 19:18

1 Answer 1

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What is the actual size of the microSD card? It shows as having two partitions, one of 16 MB, another of 119 GB, and neither have a file system. Did you intentionally create a second partition? That can also happen during attempted use of the card as boot media when an application such as Rufus creates a separate boot partition. In any case, it's puzzling that there is no file system in either partition.

In order to use the disk, a file system must be written to the card. Unless you have a need for two partitions, do the following, using Windows Disk Management or a third-party tool such as free DiskGenius, which offers greater capability (e.g. extx file system).

  • Delete both partitions, creating ~135 GB free space.
  • Create a single partition using all that space.
  • Create a file system. For flash memory in microSD cards, FAT32 or exFAT is suggested.
  • Test writing and reading a few GB with the card to be sure it is not damaged.
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  • @Victor2748 - You need to edit your question instead of submitting a temporary comment. The larger partition according to Disk Management has absolutely no data on it.
    – Ramhound
    May 7, 2020 at 7:07

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