Formatting new rasbian loaded sdcard hangs various disk utils

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1

Hi I’ve just received my Pi Zero kit and am eager to get tinkering however I’ve fallen at the 1st hurdle :(.

I set my Pi Zero up on the tv and it was fine, booted as expected. Next I decided I wanted to load the sdcard with a premade Rasbian/Retropie image from the Retropie site so before doing so I decided to format the disk.

I opened the disk in my computer(win 10) used right click to select the format option of the context menu. After lets say 20 minutes there seemed to be no progress I then found that the formatting app had locked and became unresponsive so I used the task manager to kill the formatting tool.

I have tried again and again with the windows formatting tool to no avail. The official sdcard formatter I downloaded from the SD people also becomes unresponsive and freezes as does a CMD window running windows diskpart tools.

Have I borked my sdcard on the 1st day? If so how exactly? If not how to I format the little fella?

Many thanks

Mr Jbobs

2

Quite a shot in the dark here - but try right clicking on the SD card in the file manager and clicking ‘format’ there - then try again the other way.

Occasionally works for me.

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3

Thank you for your reply.

When you say file manager do you mean windows explorer?

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UPDATE: I bought a new card and same thing, I/O errors showing up when using gparted from a rescue disk.

99% sure at this point that it’s a faulty card reader.

5

Ahh - very possible.

And yes - you should be able to format an SD from windows explorer.

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