reimage sd card [duplicate]

Question

When I plug everything into my pi3 and turn it on the lights on the board come on, but it never shows up on the screen. I believe this is because I have corrupted the sd card. I have tried to plug it into a windows machine, and it wont read from it until I reformat it. I tried to reformat it with the windows reformater and it won't work. I also tried to reformat it with the SD association reformater and it still won't work reformat. Does anyone know how I can wipe everything on the card and make it connect to windows so I can put NOOBS on it?

Answer 1

Here is a simple way to reformat your SD card: (Full guide from RPi's official website: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/sdxc_formatting.md)

Here's an overview:

Install SD formatter: https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

And FAT32 Format: http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/guiformat.htm

Next,

Run the SD Formatter tool first with "FORMAT SIZE ADJUSTMENT" set to "ON", to ensure that any other partitions on the SD card are deleted. Then run the FAT32 Format (guiformat.exe) tool, ensure you choose the correct drive letter, leave the other options at their default settings, and click "Start".

If you need help reinstalling NOOBS, click here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/noobs.md

Answer 2

You probably need to clean, and re-create the primary partition on the card.

Full instructions for using windows built-in diskpart tool here.

After executing create partition primary your SD card should reappear in your file browser and you will be able to format it with the windows formatter again.

If the clean command fails, just retry it until it works. It sometimes cannot clean on the first go, for whatever reason. Usually doesn't take more than 2 or 3 attempts and it's a very quick process once you have done it a couple of times.