Cured my SD Card "write protected when switch is right" problem

Hi all!

I joined this forum the other day because I found it useful in trouble shooting problems that I had when restoring my households 3 computers that were rootkit controlled.

Anyway, wanted to say thanks in general, because info I used to help me was all through these forums.

So I cured one of my problems myself, when no matter where I looked on the web there was no solution.

My old pavilion has a SD reader that suddenly was calling EVERY sd card write protected. Well, I made sure the locking switch was NOT on write protect, yet no matter what SD card I used, it always said this.

Long story short, after not finding ANY solution that worked on the web, I decided right before I was about to give up, to take an air compressor and blow the crap out of the slot...

It worked! Must have been some dust or something in the right place at the wrong time, but blowing out the slot cleared it up and it works like new.

cheers!

Welcome to Windows Seven Forums.

First, thanks for the thumbs up to WSF. Second, thanks for posting your fix as no doubt it may help someone else in the future.

I have this problem as well, but I'm afraid blowing out the slot did not fix it. I notice from other forums that this is a common problem with HP Pavilion laptops and that in some cases teh contacts inside the slot are deformed. In any event, thanks for pointing out that for some people a clean out of the slot may be sufficient to fix the problem.

Loved your solution palehorse777...practical...and it did work for me...saved me hours in tinkering and figuring out if it was a driver issue.

I joined this forum just so I could say thanks -- thanks so much! I didn't have compresed air, so I blew in the card slot a few times, and problem solved. :)

i know old thread and all, but , ive been having this problem for about 2 years now, and damn i just did the blow into the hole thing and it automagically worked, i cant beleive this didnt occur to me before, i always thought bad driver bad hardware, it was just some dust.... LOL really thank you for this "special" solution...sometimes the most simple things are the most important right

I have also found a solution, but does not involve blowing air into the card reader, so anyone who is still having problems could try this:

I could not get Windows to write to the card. I tried following this:

Open the RUN window (windows key +r)
Type diskpart in the run window
In diskpart type list disk
Type select disk x where x represents the disk number of the SD card in the left column
Be careful to select the right one - you don't want to erase your HD or anything like that!
Type clean - ALL partitions will now be removed from the card, as well as an mbr or boot sector wich might be there if you ever made it bootable.
Your card is now no more than an expensive brick...
Type create partition primary - a new primary partition will be created, as big as possible
Type active if you want to set the partition active (you probably do not need this step)
Exit diskpart and format the sd card and you may be ready to go

But Windows froze at Clean - all, and then could not format the card, and I could not redo the Clean - all command because Windows was saying it was write protected.

My solution was to use my camera to format the card. I was then able to put it back in my PC card reader and Windows was able to format it how I wanted it.