how to format unrecognized sd in terminal?

[owners4life5]

okay so i have an sd card that when i put into my reader, it doesn.t show up. i tried a different one, and it worked fine. so my initial reaction is "format it".... i would rather use the terminal than g.u.i, for obvious reasons. there.s nothing important on the card so i can format it or screw it up. no big deal.

any help is greatly appreciated.

thanks

[utnubuuser]

man dd

[owners4life5]

man dd

explain please

[owners4life5]

bump

[owners4life5]

bump

[owners4life5]

come on, guys, no one can answer this?

[owners4life5]

trying to revive my old, unsolved threads..

so bump

[coffeecat]

i would rather use the terminal than g.u.i, for obvious reasons.

What are the obvious reasons? Does the card show up when you do 'sudo fdisk -lu'?

So long as it shows up in fdisk (demonstrating that it's not completely defunct), the easiest way would be to use Disk Utility in the System > Administration menu. But if you really want to use the terminal, you could use fdisk. It's been years since I did that, so you'll have to read the fdisk man pages if you really want to use the terminal.

edit: no, that won't do. fdisk will only edit the partition table. You'll still have to create a filesystem in the empty partition(s). Use Disk Utility and save yourself some grief.

[owners4life5]

no see, the problem is, it will not show up for anything..nada. i need to completely "reset it", per se

[coffeecat]

no see, the problem is, it will not show up for anything..nada. i need to completely "reset it", per se

That probably means that it's dead. It's an ex-SD card. It's nailed to the perch. Sorry. If it doesn't show up with sudo fdisk -lu even as an unformatted device, then it's likely a goner.

SD cards have a short life. Like all flash devices they die much sooner than hard drives.