Using Chkdsk to Fix Corrupted/Damaged SD Card

6 min readNov 2, 2020

As a tiny, portable and functional type of extended capacity, the SD card still plays an essential role in popular devices, such as digital cameras, Android phones & tablets, video game consoles, and some electronic instruments. It’s “walking” storage that can be placed on multiple different devices. As it is, frequently plugging in and out an SD card is likely to expose problems, especially without safe ejection, giving rise to file system corruption or bad sectors.

Common Signs of SD Card Corruption

Are you experiencing the exact SD card corruption issue? Apart from the improper handle of the SD card, many other devastating situations will bring an SD card not working anymore. The commonly seen factors are, e.g, a virus infection, interrupt data transfer, SD card removal while writing files to it, etc.

Anyway, when you see any one of the following signs, it means that your SD card has been corrupted, damaged, or at least needs small repairs.

SD card suddenly shows empty
Photos and other preserved files are missing.
SD card becomes extremely slow
The camera hangs or turns black screen while taking pictures.
SD card is not open
Windows asks you to format the SD card before you can use it
The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.
SD card is not showing up in Windows.
SD card is not recognized — it shows no media in Windows Disk Management or it is simply not visible at all…

8 Ways to Fix Corrupted/Damaged SD Card

To fix different levels of damage, SD card owners should try troubleshooting methods one by one, from simple to complex. Altogether, 8 ways of SD card repair solutions are widely recommended on websites and forums. Let’s start with a detailed guide for each fix.

Tip 1. Change a card reader, adapter, or a USB port

Sometimes, connection issues or power issues are likely to cause SD card problems. First of all, it’s better to exclude exterior factors that can be fixed with a few tricks.

How do you connect the removable SD card to the PC? Take advantage of anything available to you, like a different USB port on your computer, a new car adapter, or another computer. Try a re-connection a couple of times. Does your memory card work normally again? If changing a connection device helps remove the SD card errors, take prompt measures to prevent data loss. Try to copy pictures and videos as many as possible from the SD card to cloud storage or other safe places.

Tip 2. Run Windows Repair Tool

Nothing’s changed by performing the primary examination? Continue with the native Windows check and repair tool to repair the SD card.

Connect the SD card to your PC
Press Windows + E to open Windows Explorer.
Right-click the SD card and open its Properties.
Click on the Tools tab.
Click the Check button.
Let the scan process completes. Close the scan window once it finishes.

Tip 3. Change a drive letter

If the Windows system does not assign a drive letter to the SD card, or because its drive letter is conflicted with other drives, your SD card will act as it has corrupted, and become unreadable. This time try to change a drive letter to it with the inbuilt Windows Disk Management program.

Press Win + X keys and click Disk Management.
Find and right-click on your SD card and select Change Drive Letter and Path.
Click Add and select a new drive letter and click “OK” to save all the changes.

Tip 4. Run CHKDSK to check and repair SD card bad sectors

SD card has a limited lifespan, like other removable storage devices. It will grow bad sectors after a long period of use. Chkdsk cmd is good at finding SD card file system corruption errors and removing bad sectors from it. This is also the most applicable way to repair the SD card without formatting it.

Plug your SD card into your computer with a card reader.
Go to the start menu, type “cmd” in a search bar, hit enter and you will see “cmd.exe” in a list of programs.
Click “cmd.exe” and then you will get the following command window that will allow you to fix your corrupted SD card without formatting.

Type in chkdsk /X /f [sd card letter]: or chkdsk [sd card letter]: /f.

For example, chkdsk /X /f h: or chkdsk h: /f, if your card is in drive letter H.

After finishing all these steps, Windows will begin to check and fix the file system of the SD card. It usually takes several minutes. After that, if you see “Windows has made corrections to the file system” in the command window, then congratulations, the damaged SD card is successfully fixed, and you can see your data again.

If you don’t have any technical know-how and want to minimize data risks, using third-party software could be a better choice. The Command line is suitable for computer professionals since wrong commands can cause severe problems. Therefore, we strongly recommend you to try an automatic command line alternative.

Tip 5. Reinstall the SD card driver

The chances are that the SD card is not recognized by Windows at all, and you cannot see it anywhere in Windows Explorer or Windows Disk Management. You can try to reinstall the driver to make it appear again in the Windows Device Manager.

Press Win + X keys and click Device Manager.
Expand Disk Drives, right-click on the name of your removable disk, and click Uninstall.

Click OK. Disconnect the SD card from your computer.
Restart your computer. After a while, connect the SD card to your computer again. Windows will install the latest driver automatically and make the SD card detectable.

Tip 6. Format a RAW SD card

If the card is seen in Windows Disk Management but displays as RAW, you need to format it with a proper file system like NTFS or FAT32.

Tip 7. Format a half-capacity SD Card

There are moments that your SD card is with 32GB but it shows only half capacity or less, you need to restore its full capacity by formatting.

You can go on with Windows File Explorer or Disk Management, besides, some SD card makers developed SD card formatter that is specialized to fix corruption issues. The third-party SD card format tools are also useful in handling a corrupted SD card which formatting can be a great way out.

Tip 8. Create a new SD card partition on unallocated space

RAW memory card won’t show up in your computer, as well as when the SD card turns to empty, showing as unallocated space. To make it appear as normal, you need to manually create a partition to make Windows rec