Update to SD Card Formatter, That's All

Quick update to tack onto that first post where I shared the SD Card Formatter. If you missed it, here's the original write-up.

How I lost 256GB

I'd been deep in some projects and needed to flash an image of Pi OS onto one of my SD cards. ("Flash," sorry — old habit.) Somewhere during the boot setup I messed something up, so I went to flash a fresh image. But wait: my SD card now reads 50MB. Fifty. When it's supposed to be 256GB. What gives?

I'm not about to tolerate that kind of storage loss. I didn't dig too hard into the exact why — I couldn't even flash the image I wanted with the card in that state, so I just wanted it fixed. My hunch is the boot process carves out a partition (or a few) during the initial Pi setup, and that's what's throwing off the reported size. There are programs that'll confirm it, but I didn't want to dilly-dally in a partition manager. I just wanted to get back on my way.

The fix: Format Size Adjustment

Here's where that simple SD Card Formatter — the official one from the SD Card site — comes in handy. Other formatters don't have this going for them.

Grab the card and the formatter and do this:

• Pick your SD card from the drop-down.
• Select Quick Format (fine for now — do whatever you like another time).
• Hit the Option button. That's where you can change the format style — leave it on quick.
• Right under that you'll see Format Size Adjustment. Set it to On.
• Click OK and format.

The card's original storage size comes right back. How cool is that? Pretty damn cool, I'd say — no fumbling around in a partition manager, no risking the card, or worse, some other drive. Your C drive.

Sources

• SD Memory Card Formatter — SD Association