Raspberry pi – Used memory cards vs Windows.

Daddykins was helping a friend of his with a Raspberry Pi issue. Part way through the conversation, he mentioned that his Raspberry Pi had stopped the cards from working. Fortunately, there is an easy fix for this. and I thought I’d knock up a few screenshots, and Daddykins can send the link to help with the problem. I’ve also seen this cause problems when trying to burn a new image onto a memory stick you’ve used previously.

Here, I’ve inserted a 16Gb memory card that already has a Raspberry Pi image on it. As you can see, the free space is only a few tens of megabytes, and certainly not the 16Gb on the card. Even if you go to format it, it’ll only show a small amount of space.

This is because, when the card is set up to be used with the Raspberry Pi, it uses the vast majority of the memory card that Windows doesn’t recognise. You simply need to delete these areas (partitions), and combine them back into one area that Windows can see.

Right-Click “This PC” in your start menu and select “More”, then “Manage”

When in there go to “Storage” and select “Disk Management”

You’ll see your memory card listed. As you can see, the drive is split into two. You might see three or four. The size of the first part will match what you can see in Windows, and the others will be the rest of the card that Windows currently can’t recognise. Make sure you select the right drive, because you’re about to delete whatever is on there…. selecting one of your hard drives instead of the memory card will really put a dampener on your day.

Right click each of the parts and select “Delete Volume”. If done right, the split will go, and you’ll end up with the whole card as “unallocated”.

Right click once more, select “New Simple Volume”. Click Next 4 times (This will allow Windows to take care of the drive size) Click Finish, Windows will ask you to format the drive, and you have a full-size memory card again!

Hope you found this helpful. I’ll be back with more blog related stuff when I’m actually doing something interesting. I might even finish the “10 Days of Albums” series… if you’re lucky.