Help Method to Assign Drive Letter

[nvrau]

Posting in hope it may be possible to assign a drive letter to an SD card that Android alerts as "Damaged SD Card" and wants to reformat it. This is the case on a PC, too.

Alternatively, has anyone had any success with data recovery software when the PC doesn't assign a drive letter?

Thanks for reading!

 

[lotus49]

The short answer is that you can't. Windows will not assign a drive letter to a drive that it doesn't recognise.

I don't use Windows on a regular basis so, if this were my card, I'd run fsck on my Linux laptop. If you don't have access to a Linux machine, there are lots of Windows programs that claim to be able to recover data from a damaged SD card so you could start a new thread asking for recommendations for appropriate software.

 

[sreum]

No you can't assign a drive letter to a SD card. It's flash memory and is recognized and treated as such by the computer.

Now if you removed the card from the phone and have a way to directly connect the card to the Computer then yes you may be able to assign a letter to it.

But it sounds like you have a bad card and nothing is allowing you to use it without first formatting the card. Is that correct?

 

[nvrau]

Now if you removed the card from the phone and have a way to directly connect the card to the Computer then yes you may be able to assign a letter to it.

Is that correct?

Since this post, I used a little external card reader to USB adapter on a different PC and was finally given D:\ however the PC still wants to format it.

After a bit more research it appears the MBR may be corrupt? As well, I have tried a couple of data recovery apps on the PC (Recuva, Lazesoft, TestDisk & PhotoRec) and was finally able to successfully scan to find files. However, after saving those files, none of them would open.

I found another post which suggested running a Quick Format to rebuild the file structure. It stated it would do so without writing over the data but that is not the way I understand it works. At this point I may have little option but to give it a go.

 

[sreum]

Good luck.

And thanks for the feedback regarding the SD card hooking up to the Computer as a drive.