SD Formatter - Partition Recovery Tool

Just a quick tutorial for the average pc user.

When setting up your SD Card it will partition it. In short It took my 8 Gig SD card and made it 75mb in Windows. This is known but Windows can't exactly format or partition it back to 8 Gigs. Many programs can do this but you have to download them also SD cards have a protected area you don't want to damage this. If you wish to get your card back to full size again I suggest downloading this tool from the SD Association

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_3/

It works on Windows and Mac

when you insert an imaged card into your machine it will show the active partition i.e. 75mb to get the full partition back just go to options and set Format - Adjustment Size to ON



Above is the default setting.

This worked great for me and I feel better about this tool because it comes from the SD Association not some freeware ad configured software that installs things you don't want.

The standard image has multiple partitions, but only the small boot partition is visible to Windows.

The raspi-config tool lets you sort it all out expanding the partitions to fill the card once you boot the Pi. If you expanded the boot partition to fill the rest of the card then you have just wasted a lot of space.

The standard image has multiple partitions, but only the small boot partition is visible to Windows.

The raspi-config tool lets you sort it all out expanding the partitions to fill the card once you boot the Pi. If you expanded the boot partition to fill the rest of the card then you have just wasted a lot of space.

Sorry this is more how to recover an SD Card say you get a 4gb and put it in your PI then you get an 8gb and want to get the 4gb card back for say a camera or something this will recover the 4gb card back to default you can put it in a camera and try to format but it may or may not work this should work every time. This will erase the card so it assumes you aren't putting it back into the pi or maybe you just want to do a fresh install and you could start with this and so on.

Ok, that makes more sense.
I'd adjust the first post if I were you to make that clearer.

Ok, that makes more sense.
I'd adjust the first post if I were you to make that clearer.

It was perfectly clear to me. No edit necessary.