Help SD card failure - unable to format.

[CoastalDroid]

Having a bit of a nightmare today. My HTC Desire GSM (running CM7 with App2SD) suddenly reported it could not see SD card. On reboot it got stuck in a loop on the CM7 splash screen. When I removed the SD card and inserted into Win 7 PC it could not be seen at all (by Explorer). Initially tools such as TestDisk and Minitool Partition Wizard reported that they could see the partitions, but I could not recover anything, therefore I thought I would just try to remove partitions/reformat/start from scratch... problem now is, after a surface scan, the only app that now actually "sees" the card is Minitool Partition Wizard, which reports "Bad Disk".

When I tried formatting whilst SD inside phone (using CWM), I get:
- Can't mount /dev/block/mmcblk0pl
- (invalid argument)
- Error Mounting /sdcard/!

Any way I can be truly sure my SD card (Lexar 32Gb Class10) has not actually incurred physical damage?

 

[CoastalDroid]

Not to worry -- I found the DriveWipe tool which reported the card as unallocated, allowing me to reimplement partitions etc.

 

[CoastalDroid]

Not good! I thought I had addressed this once I'd managed to reformat my SD card and re-implement a ROM directly from it. One day later, it failed to be seen by the phone once again! I therefore grabbed the only other SD card I had access to (a 1GB SD card out of an old phone) and formatted with ext3 partition. Once again, after one day, the phone is now reporting the same "error mounting SD card".

Could this be a fault with my phone, or perhaps the SD card is being formatted incorrectly/badly? I used Minitool Partition Wizard to prepare both these SD cards -- should I look at an alternative method to prepare the cards? I would just format from Recovery mode implicitly, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that this can cause problems in itself.

Any advice on how to get my SD card in the best possible shape for use with CM7?

 

[Hadron]

Try using GParted. Minitool frankly causes a lot of problems - can't say whether it's the cause here, but it is the first thing I'd change.

 

[CoastalDroid]

GParted worked a charm.