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I was making a bootable SD card for my raspberry pi on ubuntu 18.04 and accidentally I put my computer to sleep. I ended up running my SD card, it doesn't want to format nether be partitioned, I tried using Gparted with no results: there is a red exclamation sign next to a EXT4 partition name. I event tried to use the command: 

sudo mkfs.vfat -F32 -v /dev/mmcblk0p2

It displays this and get stuck: 

/dev/mmcblk0p2 has 4 heads and 16 sectors per track,
hidden sectors 0x18000;
logical sector size is 512,
using 0xf8 media descriptor, with 10452992 sectors;
drive number 0x80;
filesystem has 2 32-bit FATs and 8 sectors per cluster.
FAT size is 10192 sectors, and provides 1304072 clusters.
There are 32 reserved sectors.
Volume ID is 0538c1e1, no volume label.

Is there a way to fix my SD card ? Thank you for trying to help. Have a nice day.

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  • Can you access it with cfdisk /dev/mmcblk0 (not the partition, the whole drive)?
    – FelixJN
    May 29, 2019 at 14:33
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    I always use dd to write zeros to the first 100MB or so of any device (USB stick, SD card, HDD) that has a screwed up partition table. Then I reboot and use gparted.
    – You'reAGitForNotUsingGit
    May 29, 2019 at 14:46

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd* bs=512 count=32

The above should clear your partition table. Then you should be able to use gparted. Replace /dev/sd* with your device (not your partition. e.g: /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)

NB: MAKE SURE YOU USE THE CORRECT DEVICE FOR of=... OR HORRIBLE THINGS WILL HAPPEN.

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  • +1 before I had to have root permission on my SD to make changes and now using that command with root privilages allowed the non-root user to make changes
    – Missing User
    Jul 17, 2022 at 1:53

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