Hello everyone, I hope this is the right place for my question.

I have a PNY 32gig MicroSD card for about 7 months and worked fantastically. Now it seems to be on the fritz. I've tried formatting it through windows, the default android device that I originally had it in, and HDD Guru's low level format tool, all to no aval.

I get this in Guru's.


Windows is showing it as a 1gig card but will not display any files on it. Any time I connect it to a PC, windows asks to format but the format says the device is locked or that it is unable to complete the format.

I tried the PNY low level tool, but it will not run on anything over windows XP/2000. I'm using Windows 7 64bit.

Any ides what I can do?

Actually no - the DFL support forum isn't the right place, as you aren't using DFL tools. I'll ask for this thread to be moved to the Flash support forum, so don't be surprised when the thread moves to there.


Where did you buy the card, and since it's only 7 months old, can you RMA / return it under warranty?

As you're trying to wipe the card, it seems you don't need the data on it. Hopefully you didn't lose anything important when the card started to have this problem.

Those types of messages are, unfortunately, consistent with the card being a counterfeit small capacity (e.g. 1GB) card which has been reprogrammed to report itself as a larger capacity (e.g. 32GB) card. Superficially such cards tend to work fine, until lots of data has been written to them. Then they start to behave strangely, like yours. Other explanations are also possible, but either way, I doubt you'll fix the card - it's likely either counterfeit or faulty. Hence my question about whether you can return it under warranty...

If the card was still allowing writes, then there are ways to test the card and find its real capacity - but after the card prevents writing, then there's no sensible testing that you can do, as it clearly has a bigger problem.

Thanks for the reply! I bought it from a walk-in retail chain called Micro Center. I believe it's just faulty, but I guess there is a remote possibility that it is counterfeit. I tried calling PNY, but without proof of purchase or the UPC, they won't do a warranty exchange.

I don't "need" the data, but some of it was irreplaceable, photos, videos, ROM backups. Nothing really worth spending money on to recover though. Oh well... I guess I'll just have to grab another. Thanks again!