You are fiddling with installing/changing something on your Raspberry Pi, you corrupt the SD card and no matter what you do you cannot seem to reformat it to reuse. Probably I am not the only one who has done this. I have a reliable way of resurrecting the cards, from trial and error, here it is, any comments? (I’m using a MS Windows machine to do it).
- Completely clean the card.
- Start a command prompt.
- Use the command “diskpart”, a new window will open.
- List the disks “list disk”.
- Select the SD card “select disk #” where # is the number of the disk.
- Double or triple check that you have got the right disk…
- Use the command “clean”.
- Exit diskpart.
- Reformat it.
- Get and install a copy of sdformatter from here https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/.
- Use it to reformat the whole SD card (note with size adjustment on), you should be seeing it’s full size now.
- Get and install a new copy of the OS that you want from here http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/.
- Copy it to the card. I used win32diskimager got and installed from here http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/.
- Put the card in your Pi and boot
Theoretically, you should be able to copy a backup of the SD card image to a clean SD card and restore your whole system in a similar manner. I haven’t got this to work yet.