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Micro SD Card write protected

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Since today morning my memory card has become write protected. It means I cannot add/edit/delete from the card. I tried every possible trick in the book without any luck. I am using Note 2 (USC) on OmniROM with Samsung micro SD HC 16 gig card.

I tried formatting it through android, windows, diskpart and even Linux. But no luck. It shows all the content but many are with 0 bytes. Luckily I was able to copy my pictures on PC. The card was working fine till last night. I exchanged few pix with my wife through bluetooth.

I could not find any solution on the net. Please help me. Is it possible to get the card working again or not.

Coincidentally my colleague card also has the same problem about 2-3 weeks ago and his card is still not working. He is on S2 (GSM).

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Since today morning my memory card has become write protected. It means I cannot add/edit/delete from the card. I tried every possible trick in the book without any luck. I am using Note 2 (USC) on OmniROM with Samsung micro SD HC 16 gig card.

I tried formatting it through android, windows, diskpart and even Linux. But no luck. It shows all the content but many are with 0 bytes. Luckily I was able to copy my pictures on PC. The card was working fine till last night. I exchanged few pix with my wife through bluetooth.

I could not find any solution on the net. Please help me. Is it possible to get the card working again or not. see the image below

Coincidentally my colleague card also has the same problem about 2-3 weeks ago and his card is still not working. He is on S2 (GSM).

put your micro sd card in a jacket(usually it comes in box with indian phones) and turn off the lock in jacket it will be fine

it is also called micro sd to sd card adapter

Edited by nikme

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^^^ Will try tomorrow and let you know.

Sent from my SCH-R950 using Tapatalk 2

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Its not working. It saying the disk is write protected. I can only access the files..

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After you turn off the lock put the sd with jacket into a card reader and try ?

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is your card by any chance "verbatim" make? had similar problems with two cards of that make. Had something to do with charging the handset from PC through USB

Edited by commonman

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After you turn off the lock put the sd with jacket into a card reader and try ?

I tried everything. But the same issue.

is your card by any chance "verbatim" make? had similar problems with two cards of that make. Had something to do with charging the handset from PC through USB

I doubt it. When this problem occur at that time phone had heated a lot and battery was drained to 70% within 30 minutes without doing anything. I dont know what had happen. I unplugged the charger and kept the phone as it is.

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connect sd to pc are try running chkdsk to see what error it throws

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No luck. When I gice chdsk without any options it runs fast and gives no error. But if i give with "/f", gets below error:

"The specified I/O operation on <drive> was not completed before the time-out period expired."

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If this kind of error was caused by some virus or trojan, follow the steps (1) Download "Active KillDisk" software (Trial version available here http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm ) (2) Install "Active KillDisk" in to your PC (3) Plug the damaged Micro SD Card to the PC ( with the help of adapter or card reader) (4) Run "Active KillDisk" (5) In the "Active KillDisk" window, select your Micro SD Card drive (6) In the "Active KillDisk" window, click on the "KILL" button, a pop up window will appear, then click on the "START" button, again another pop up window will appear, type ERASE-ALL-DATA on the pop up window and click "OK". (7) Wait till all the erasing process is complete, all data in the Micro SD Card will be erased, all formatted area in your Micro SD Card will be unformatted. (8) Go to my computer window in your PC, your Micro SD Card symbol will be shown there, but volume is not shown. Right click on your Micro SD Card symbol and opt to format. After formatting, you can use your Micro SD Card as normal.

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I don't think it was because of Trojan.. Anyway will try this method and post result.

Sent from my SCH-R950 using Tapatalk 2

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1. Try to use disk utility of Mac. (use any macbook or macbook air) Opt for security options and take maximum time method. or

2. Use any Palm trio 600 or 650 phone to format. it will definitely do.

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Do you get access denied / write protected error when you try to Format ?

If the format completes, just ensure that you had selected "full format" i.e. NOT the "quick format" or /q option

Quick format only writes the File Allocation Table. Full format will mark all bad sectors and capacity will be reduces accordingly but it will work properly.

Though you mention you have tried with diskpart, I am just mentioning the below in case you didn't do it:

1. Start > Run > cmd

2. type "diskpart" -> runs diskpart.exe from system folder
3. type "list volume" -> now you see all your connected drives, see which one is the drive
4. type "select volume #" -> # being the letter of your drive
5. type "attributes disk clear readonly" -> removing the protection

6. Then open your SD, you can now edit, delete, move files.

There can only be the following reasons for this write protect behavior:

1. Write protect tab is on lock position on the SD Card to Micro SD Card Adaptor. Are you using a sd card to usb adaptor ? If yes, can you try another adaptor or try formatting on the phone ?

2. File system is corrupt. Use a low level formatting tool like this , Low level tools will skip the file system drivers and write to the sectors directly. read here

3. Disk sectors are corrupt (ie Hardware on the card): In this case a low level format will just mark the bad sectors as such and disk capacity will be accordingly reduced but whatever is left will work fine.

4. The write protection thing is a very old tech using a small diode and light sensor and many issues are possible incl dirt which will start showing it as write protect. If you are using your laptop's inbuilt MMC reader then just try on another laptop or with a SD Card reader.

The following should not occur technically but sometimes they do occur due to some random bugs:

Did you put it into a Mac by any chance ? Sometimes it changes to GPT and gets really strange behaviour on windows & android. Though it only happened to me while trying to make bootable mac os disk on the sd card.

Do you have root on your phone ? If yes, Can you use a root explorer and try to select permissions and see if read only is selected ?

Did you by any chance put it in a blackberry with 'Encrypt SD Card" selected.

Can't think of anything else. I have only had this problem once with mac and once with google chromebook installer making 18 partitions with GPT on my microsd.

Google ChromeOS installer has an option to fix this so I am attaching that too.

It'll try to download 4 MB conf file you can let it do that or just remove internet so it fails. after that select options and select format usb drive and it will do its thing and then open windows format tool. Took me 2-3 tries to get my sdcard fixed.

chromeosimagecreatorV2.zip

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^^^ I tried with clearing disk attributes but result is same.

I never connected it to any Apple device and I tried formatting the card on various laptops/PCs with different card readers without any luck. Even low level formatting is giving error and Chrome Image creator also failed.

Low level formatting error:

Format Error Occurred at offset <number> : 1117 -Device I/O Error.

Number is I guess sector number of the card.

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As per internet search, this error seems to occur when a large part of the initial sectors used to store file allocation table (and it's backup copy) are damaged.

There does not seem to be any way to recover this. You can post it to me and I'll also have a go & post it back to you either way. Though there's very little chance as you have done everything possible.

Replace Suggest you replace the card, since anyway there would be issues of reliability now and you will keep backing up data to avoid future loss.

Usually bad sectors are skipped by low level format and fat is made where ever good sectors are present. But most software (FS driver) has a list of hard coded sectors to start looking for fat and once a lot of them are damaged then nothing can be done. You can manually put fat at different places but that's not worth it in practice.

Google has implemented some changes in flash read/write from 4.3 or 4.4 to extend life of the sd card. This can usually only happen if you have some apps moved to SD Card which are accessing files all the time due to bad coding. Usually only the user data part is moved to sdcard but it depends on how the developer has written it. One of the reasons why google is discouraging sdcard more and more with their updates.

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^^^ @Ami1 thanx for the support and help. I don;t feel the efforts are worth the cost. Thanx again for your gesture. I am planning to buy a new card.

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