When your SD card refuses to be recognized and asks to be formatted, you feel like you are facing a brick wall. Formatting a device erases the Data Recovery, so you won’t be able to access your files anyway.
Here’s the bad news: if the error is still the same when connected to another computer, formatting is really the only way to fix your corrupt SD card.
Here’s the good news: this article will teach you how to format your SD card without losing your data. Yes it’s possible. All you need is your SD card, a computer, and the internet.
So, you got this message: “You need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it. Do you want to format it?” It usually happens when your SD card is corrupted or something is wrong with the file system.
For both methods, we will be using a data recovery tool called Disk Drill. It is powerful enough to extract data directly from the file system, but it is also very easy to use. Even if you are not a tech expert, you can easily follow it. It also offers 500MB of free data recovery. This should suffice for most non-video files you need to restore.
For guaranteed recovery, we’ll use Disk Drill’s byte-by-byte backup feature (completely FREE) to create a “backup image” of your SD card before formatting it. This “image backup” is a clone of your SD card with 100% of the data preserved.