SD Card Not Showing Up or Working in Windows 11/10/8/7
Is your SD card not showing up or working on PC? Here you can find a list of solutions to fix the SD card is not showing up, detected, recognized, working, reading or mounting issues effectively. If it has caused data loss, apply Deep Data Recovery for fast and effective data recovery on your SD card.
SD Card Not Showing Up or Working Solutions Overview
There are 5 effective ways to fix SD card not working or showing up including testing SD card on another PC, changing the drive letter, running CHKDSK, and a lot more. See which solution works well:
Solution 1. Test SD Card on Another PC or A New Card Reader
Solution 2. Change the Drive Letter of Unrecognized SD Card
Solution 3. Run CHKDSK to Make the SD Card Detectable
Solution 4. Update the SD Card Driver
Solution 5. Recover Data and Format SD card
SD Card Not Showing Up Symptoms
If you are having one of the below-listed problems on your SD card, it means that your SD card has got some tricky issues and you may even lose saved data in your card:
- SD card is not recognized
- SD card is not detected by PC, Android phone, camera, or camcorder
- SD card is not reading on cellphone, computer, camera or video player
- SD card doesn't show up on PC, camera, Android phone, etc.
To find solutions to fix the SD card problems that you are having, you may first check and find how and why the detecting, recognizing issues occurred to your SD, SDHC, SDXC, Micro SD cards.
Why Is SD Card Not Showing Up
It is a common issue that SD is not showing up on Windows PC. Check the list of possible reasons and you may find the exact reason that caused your SD card not showing up or recognized.
- Poor contact between SD card and computer.
- The drive letter of your SD card is missing.
- The file system of the SD card is unrecognized or corrupted.
- The device driver is outdated.
- The SD card is infected with a virus.
These problems are not exclusive to PC users. Thus, it's really necessary for you to know how to solve these problems. A similar issue also occurs to Mac users now and then, you can follow this link: flash drive not showing up on Mac to get rid of this issue from your SD card on Mac.
Based on the reasons above, we have collected a list of solutions to fix this issue. You can try them one by one to repair a corrupted memory card not detected, and no data loss will happen.
Solution 1. Test SD Card on Another PC or A New Card Reader
Applies to: There's a problem with the computer interface or SD card reader.
When you encounter this issue that the SD card or hard drive is not showing up on your PC, the first thing you should check is whether the SD card has a connection issue. Here, you’ll have two ways to test your unrecognized or undetectable SD card:
- Change a new SD card reader or a new SD card USB adaptor
- Connect the SD card to another PC
Then you can test your SD card and see if it shows up on your PC or not. If it does work with the new SD card reader or the new computer, then it's not a faulty card. Your card reader should be faulty.
If your SD card neither works on the other PC nor the new card reader, the problem exists in your SD card. Read on and you'll find better solutions to resolve this problem.
Solution 2. Change the Drive Letter of Unrecognized SD Card
Applies to: SD card does not have a driver letter disk or there is drive letter conflict problem.
If your SD card is connected to the computer well but it fails to show up in File Explorer, you can go to Disk Management to see whether its drive letter is missing or disappearing.
If it's so, you can assign a new drive letter to your card and make it recognizable again with the steps below:
Step 1. Right-click the Windows Start button, choose "Disk Management".
Step 2. Located the SD card, right-click the partition on it, and select "Change Drive Letter and Path…".
Step 3. In the pop-up window, click "Add" to assign the drive letter to your SD card.
Solution 3. Run CHKDSK to Fix the SD Card Error
Applies to: SD card not detected because of the corrupted file system.
Step 1. Right-click on My Computer/This PC and select "Manage", click on "Disk Management". Find the device in the drive viewer and check out whether the computer can detect your memory card or not.
If it is not detectable, continue the process with the CHKDSK command with the following steps.
Step 2. Press "Win+R" keys > Type: cmd and hit Enter.
Step 3. Type: chkdsk g: / f and hit Enter. (g is the drive letter of your memory card).
Or you can type: chkdsk D:/f /offlinescanandfix and hit Enter. This will check and fix the found errors in your memory SD card automatically and make the card detectable again.
Solution 4. Update the SD Card Driver
Applies to: SD is not working due to outdated or problematic disk driver.
Go to Device Manager, here you will see the card reader in the list. If it has a yellow sign beside it, the problem is most probably caused by a driver issue. Then you need to update the driver. Here's how to do:
Step 1. Connect the SD card to the PC.
Step 2. Navigate "Control Panel > System > Device Manager > Disk drivers".
Step 3. Find and right-click on the SD card, and first choose "Uninstall" and then choose "Scan for hardware changes" to refresh the drivers.
Solution 5. Recover Data and Format SD Card for Reusing
Applies to: The basic fixes don't work and the last resort is to format the SD card.
If the SD card is still not working or recognized, or your SD card can be detected but you lost important files after these attempts, we advise you to apply one of the best data recovery software - Deep Data Recovery software to recover data from your SD card. Then format your sd card to make it reusable again.
Your Safe SD Card Recovery Software
- Restore lost data from SD card for sudden deletion, formatting, files system corruption, virus attack, etc.
- Recover files from SD card, emptied recycle bin, memory card, flash drive, digital camera, and camcorders
- Recover deleted photos from SD card, as well as documents, videos, audio, music, emails, etc.
Note: Only if your SD card can be detected in Disk Management, Deep Data Recovery will work for fast data scanning and restoring.
To recover data from an SD card, follow these steps:
Step 1. Download and Install for Recovery SD Card Online
Click the download button to get this Software installation package and install it on your computer. Run it and click "Next". Next, you need to connect your SD card to the SD card slot on your laptop, of put it in a SD card reader and plug in it to the USB slot. Make sure it is connected firmly.
Step 2. Select the SD Card to scan
In the next windows, you're supposed to select the SD Card to scan. If you have connected it successfully with your computer, the SD card recovery software will detect and display it in the window. Please click "Scan" to track down all lost or deleted files on SD card.
Step 3. Preview and Recover SD Card Data
In the result window, all the found files are listed. Choose the files you need to recover from the SD card, and click "Recover" to save them to your computer. If you still not see the needed files, then try the "deep scan". Generally speaking, it will find more lost files on your SD card.
After restoring and saving the SD card to another secure location on your PC, you can then format the SD card and convert the file system to FAT32 or NTFS, make it available for saving data again.
Final Verdicts
In this article, we've discussed the symptom, causes, and solutions to the SD card not showing up issue. There are five methods in all to solve SD card not detected, recognized, or reading in Windows 10.
At the very beginning, you can try to connect your SD card to another computer with a new card reader to resolve the connection problem. If that doesn't solve the problem, keep trying more methods such as change the SD card drive letter, run CHKDSK to repair the corrupted file system of SD card, update SD card drive, and more.
If none of the basic solutions works, there is still an effective solution, and that is formatting your SD card for reuse. Because formatting is bound to result in data loss, it is important to use Deep Data Recovery software to restore data from SD card before formatting.
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