Help with formatting

[jastnorn]

So, I got Raspbian installed and up and running. For some reason, after installing the VNC add on in the menus the system started giving me the bad filesystem error.

I thought, "Hey, I can just reformat and start again."

No such luck. I am now stuck with a micro SD card (32GB) that has a 40 MB partition in FAT32, a 4 MB unallocated space, and the rest is ext4.

I have tried windows command prompt, gparted, disk manager, dd command in terminal, fdisk and many others. Every time I format it and save the changes, every program will appear to be doing something and then it refreshes and nothing has changed. The partitions will not resize, move delete, format, or anything.

I need help to recover my SD card. I can't even use the free space on it or delete any files on it manually.

Has Raspbian killed my SD card?

[pcmanbob]

Have you tried just downloading the raspbian image file from here : https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/
and etcher from here : https://etcher.io/

then just use etcher to flash your SD card with the image file no formatting required. https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentati ... /README.md

is it possible that your SD card is a fake as bad filesystem errors can be caused by fake cards, its also possible that your card has failed and gone read only which would mean you can make any changes.

[bratlemi]

nothing to worry. really simple solution This just means your SD i partitioned by the Linux system. You will get all your 32GB's back
Plug the card to a Windows os and run CMD as Admin

Type as followed:
Diskpart /this will open Disk partitioner in a new CMD window
list disk / to list all the available drives. You will se a 32gb drive. Look at the drive number. EXP: E:/
select disk 1 / change the 1 acording to your drive number
clean / this is what you need. the most important command. It will wipe clean the entire drive including boot sectors, partitions, files, etc if you get an error just repeat the Clean command again
create partition primary /this will create a single partition that will in the next steps take the full disk capacity
select partition 1 / selection
active / self explanitory
format FS=NTFS label=WC-Drive quick / formating. You can change FS to Fat32 file system if needed. BUT i usually skip this step and to to My computer and right click on the drive and select Format... from the dropdown list.

[jastnorn]

I have tried formatting it in Linux and it wouldn't do it. Diskpart wouldn't even see the drive since it is actually in 2 partitions and wouldn't see the volume for the ext4 since it couldn't mount it.

I think it did go to read only mode. Now that I think of it, Raspbian did throw an error about the file system being read only when I tried installing something.

Looking that up now.

[fruitoftheloom]

I have tried formatting it in Linux and it wouldn't do it. Diskpart wouldn't even see the drive since it is actually in 2 partitions and wouldn't see the volume for the ext4 since it couldn't mount it.

I think it did go to read only mode. Now that I think of it, Raspbian did throw an error about the file system being read only when I tried installing something.

Looking that up now.

Put the card in a Digital Camera or Android Device and Format..

[jastnorn]

Tried that and android "formats" it and then it has an error with the disk again.

I'm leaning towards the read only mode being on. And everything I've seen says it is likely due to corruption and/or reaching it's life span.

Thanks for the thoughts and help. At this point ill get another since they are so cheap anyways.

[bratlemi]

Diskpart doesn't count number of partitions. You can have one or 5, it doesn't matter.
But if you cannot mount it in any of the systems then i would agree with you that it's dead