Simple 'Format' killed my SD card

[Petermint]

Flash memory and magnetic disks have "spare sectors" to reallocate regular sectors when there is a write error. Cheap cards, sometimes with a fake brand on the front, have few or no spare sectors. Write errors crash the card/disk. Cheap & fake cards can be cards rejected by the major manufacturers because they had too many write errors during testing.

Your format probably brought up many write errors and pushed the card past it's limit. A format, or a major write of any type, would have failed the same on every operating system.

The $5 cards might have 5 spare sectors. The $6 equivalents might have a 100 spare sectors. A $10 Samsung/Sandisk/Toshiba might have a thousand spare sectors and have far less write errors because their products have higher tolerances.

[fridgefreezer]

@Andy - Should it matter on a sensible modern OS? I plug a storage device in, I select "format" and... undefined behaviour occurs. If it's not a reliable process there should at least be a warning box or just remove the option as "not supported" and let users try it from the command line or other utilities with the associated caveats.

@Peter - No it wasn't a cheap, old, worn out or bad SD card.

[Petermint]

Ok, a good card broken. That can happen with flash memory the same as with disk. A format starts at the beginning of the card. A broken sector there will make the card unusable. Regular use of a formatted card would not highlight a break at the start. The camera format is the most basic. If the camera cannot format the card, the card is useless for your photography. Toss the card in the bin and buy another.

Software can set a storage device to read only, something that can be overwritten with the next format. Linux cannot break the card through software. That type of failure requires hardware to supply too much voltage or the device to have a fault.

I had similar problems with USB sticks that are "just brands". Samsung etc make all the components for their flash memory devices. Most brands just buy stuff and glue it together. The same label might be on a dozen different sets of chips. You do not know what controller chip or memory chip is used inside, which means you cannot look at similar problems across other devices.

Take it back to the shop with the camera. Show them it is broken. Demand a replacement from another brand. You might have to pay the difference in price.

I usually buy Sandisk Extreme because they survive far more wear and tear than any camera. If you can recover the camera from the ocean or the ravine, the pictures will still be safe. Plus they are faster when you have 20 GB to copy to your computer.

When constructing Raspberry Pi based devices with microSD storage, I have never had a failure of a card from Toshiba, Sandisk, or Samsung. That includes leaving cards in the bottom of a toolbox and reformatting them dozens of times for testing different operating systems in the Pi.

[DraganTheMighty]

Sometimes this happens no matter the os and yes it has to do with the quality of the sdcard.

[rossdv8]

it would seem a huge coincidence that the card just happened to experience a massive failure at that exact moment

It doesn't have to be a 'massive failure'. Only a relatively few failed blocks in the wrong places on an entire drive can make a mess of lots more of it.

[ricardogroetaers]

Initial post: October 10, 2019
Last post by the author of the topic: January 17, 2021
Does this card still exist?

[DraganTheMighty]

Initial post: October 10, 2019
Last post by the author of the topic: January 17, 2021
Does this card still exist?

It doesn't harm to answer since this is something that can happen to anyone even in our days.