SD card 'write error' need to format

SD cards are flash memory devices which allow a user to store huge amount of data. Being reliable and durable, these cards have become the hot choice to store data and are used in various host devices like digital camera, PDAs, video game consoles, MP3 players etc. Despite so many advantages, these cards are also prone to errors. Most of these errors occur due to reasons like interruption in read/write process, virus attacks or file system corruption. While some SD card errors can be dealt by cleaning the contacts of the card and re-inserting it, others can be rectified by formatting the card. After formatting, the SD card data can be retrieved by using either a valid backup or SD card recovery software.

Consider a situation, you have taken your family to an exotic locale and while clicking pictures through your digital camera (which is using a SD card) you witness an error on its LCD screen:

“Write error”

The above error is not rare in case of SD cards. The moment the error erupts, the data stored on the SD card becomes inaccessible. Moreover, the SD card becomes useless as you can't even store new data on it.

Cause

The above error which rendered the SD card ineffectual can be accounted to corruption. The other reason can be relatively less memory space to accommodate new data.

Resolution

In order to rectify 'write error', you can try the following possible techniques:

• Turn the camera off, re-insert the card and then turn it on again
• If you are still not able to access the data, connect the camera to a computer
• You can use a card reader to access the SD card data
• In grim situations where nothing of the above works, format the SD card and restore the data using a backup

After formatting, the SD card becomes functional and can perform read/write operation. If a backup of the data is corrupted or invalid, you can rely on a SD card recovery software. A SD card recovery tool employs improved scanning algorithms to extract data in the event of corruption.

Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery, a well-known SD card recovery tool, is designed to recover lost/formatted/deleted multimedia files from a variety of memory cards like SD, SDHC, XD, MMC, CF etc. The easy-to-use tool is available in two versions, one each for Windows and Mac operating system.