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

[palehorse777]

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!

 

[seavixen32]

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.

 

[Britton30]

A very good and unorthodox fix. Thank you!

 

[philipargy]

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.

 

[jlatreyu]

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.

 

[Melissa H]

SImple solution worked!

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.

 

[Britton30]

Welcome to Seven Forums Meliss H! Glad your problem was fixed.

 

[nonaxanon]

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

 

[Britton30]

LOL, Welcome to Seven Forums nonaxanon! True, sometimes we geek types think too hard and don't see the simple stuff, eh?

 

[DogSlobba]

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.

 

[jumanji]

Hi Dogslobba,

Welcome to SevenForums.

Thank you for sharing your experience.

Usually we recommend so many procedures to try when an SD card becomes write protected.

If none works, we declare it dead.

Henceforth, I shall add this as one more thing to try and God knows it may work in some cases as it did for you.

Thanks again. We always value user experiences. ( Most I write is based on user experiences and my own trials, where feasible.)

 

[Britton30]

The clean all command can take a lot of time depending on the size of the device being cleaned.
You could also use diskpart to format too, after create partition primary, type format fs=ntfs quick label =name.
The label part is optional if you want to give it a name. After fs= you can also use fat32 or another format type too. If you leave out "quick" it will do a full format which takes much longer.

 

[datrax]

hiya Palehorse..

Just signed up to this forum to say thanks.. few years down the line from your original post,
but boy-oh-boy did it help!

I have this sd card that works fine in my Thinkpad, but refused to write in my girlfriends HP/Compaq model that is a few years old.. being in IT for 20 years or so, I was mumbling driver issue, etc.etc. and after 2 hours stumbled on yours post..

HAha.. awesome out of the box thinking!.. i just blew my longues out into the SD slot of my girlfriends hp/compaq laptop, and presto.. it worked on the first try!!!

Big thanks from the Netherlands

Tim

 

[jotenko]

Holy crap!

I am an IT sysadmin, all morning facing this annoying error, and just when I was about to quit I saw this thread and I thought to myself "Oh.. more BS!"

.... boy was I wrong!

Thank you so much. I registered just to thank you!

Big thanks from Portugal, European's western shore.

 

[elucid]

Brilliant, worked immediately!

 

[BennyMKW]

Thank you so so so so much. Had this issue on my windows 10 desktop and I had tried every google-able solution with no avail... until now!!!