How to Format Unformattable SD Card in Windows 10/8/7?

Can you format an unformattable SD card? This article provides you different ways for how to format unformattable SD card, pen drive, memory card, etc.

Posted by @Cherry December 17, 2024 Updated By @Cherry May 12, 2023

“My SD card says it needs to be formatted”

You may meet a lot of problems when you use an SD card. When you plug in the SD card to your computer, you may be reminded that“the SD card needs to be formatted”. It caused by many reasons -

  • It is a brand new SD card and it is unformatted. When you use it at the first time, it will be asked to format it before using.

  • There are some errors caused it unreadable, corrupted, damaged, etc.

Fortunately, you can learn how to format an unformattable SD card, pen drive, memory card, USB drive, etc.

How to format unformattable SD card in Windows?

Here we provides you two methods to format unformattable SD card in Windows 10/8/7. You can choose to use CMD, or use the third party software AOMEI Partition Assistant to do it easier.

Method 1: Format unformattable SD card using CMD

To format unformattable SD card, memory card or pen drive using CMD, here you can follw the steps below:

1. First of all, open command prompt.

2. In the command prompt, type format f:, here“f” is the drive letter which you want to format. Press Enter.

Then, your device is ready to format. Wait for the format process to complete. It may take some time.

3. When completed, type new label and press Enter.

It is easy to use, if you can’t do it successfully, try to run command prompt as administrator. If you still failed, you can try CHKDSDK.exe to check whether there are errors on the SD card.

Type chkdsk n: /f in the command prompt.“n” refers the drive letter of your SD card.

It will run chkdsk to check and fix errors on the partition, like the following screenshot:

After this operation,you will see“Windows has made corrections to the file system” in the command prompt. That means the damaged SD card is successfully fixed and you can access the SD card normally.

It you are not familiar with CMD, you can try the second method in the next content.

Method 2: Format unformattable SD card using AOMEI Partition Assistant

AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard is a great free formatting tool that can help you format an unformattable SD card easily.

Preparing:

>Free download AOMEI Partition Assistant. Install it to your computer based on Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP.

> Connect your SD card to the computer installed with AOMEI Partition Assistant.

Then, you can follow the steps to format unformattable SD card.

Step 1. Launch AOMEI Partition Assistant. It will display you the basic situation of your hard disks on your computer. Here you can see the SD card marked as“Unformatted”. To format it, here you can right-click the partition, select Format Partition in the pop-up menu.

Step 2. Here you can edit the Partition Label, choose File System, and change cluster size. AOMEI Partition Assistant allows you to format partition to NTFS, FAT32, Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, exFAT. Choose the one you need, and click OK to continue.

Step 3. You will back to the main interface. Here you can see the SD card has turned to NTFS file system. But it isn’t done, you need to click Apply at the toolbar to execute the progress.

It would take a few minutes. Wait till the progress done, and you can exit the program. After that, the SD card can be used normally.

Conclusion

Using AOMEI Partition Assistant to format unformattable SD card is such an easy thing. Actually, it can also help you solve your many formatting problems, for example: Windows was unable to complete the format. You can also use it to check partition and fix errors. It also provides you many advanced features, you can upgrade to AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional edition to get those advanced features such as partition recovery, allocate free space, etc.

Note: Windows Server users need to use AOMEI Partition Assistant Server edition.