Can't Format SD Card after Immunization

Man, this is frustrating….. I stupidly let Bitdefender immunize an SD card and now, I can't delete anything from, change drive letter or even format it. It is now useless as I can find no way to remove the 'write protected' status from it.

Tried a suggestion on here to change the drive letter and use Guiformat, but I can't change the drive letter as that option is now grayed out.

Even Powershell commands as Administrator fail to work.

Immunizer sure does work, but is just the same as throwing the SSD card in the trash.

Why is there not a nice simple option somewhere to un-immunize a device.

Any help greatly appreciated as I don't want to have to trash a 256GB card.

Thanks

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

camarie

USB immunizer is just deleting the autorun.inf and creates some files. Assuming the root drive where the card is mounting is, for example, G:, then:

if G:\autorun.inf is a folder, and the following files or folders exists:
G:\autorun.inf\bdsanitize1.file
G:\autorun.inf\bdsanitize2.file
G:\autorun.inf\bdsanitize1.dir\bdsanitize1.file
G:\autorun.inf\bdsanitize1.dir\bdsanitize2.file
G:\autorun.inf\bdsanitize1.dir\bdsanitize2.dir
this means the drive is already sanitized
if is not, then it creates the following (all with file system attribute hidden):
G:\autorun.inf directory
G:\autorun.inf\bdsanitize1.dir directory
G:\autorun.inf\bdsanitize1.file file
G:\autorun.inf\bdsanitize2.file file
G:\autorun.inf\bdsanitize1.dir\bdsanitize2.dir directory
G:\autorun.inf\bdsanitize1.dir\bdsanitize1.file directory
G:\autorun.inf\bdsanitize1.dir\bdsanitize2.file directory
make G:\autorun.inf accessible only for administrators to prevent overwriting

I don't think this makes the card unusable. If you want to revert this (at least for now), try to mount the card, get the drive letter (say it's G:), open a command prompt as Administrator and run cd /D G:\, then see if the items above are present. You might try to remove (or rename, for example G:\autorun.inf into G:\autorun.inf.bak), then unmount the card, wait for several moments, eject the device, and reinsert it.
Of course, without knowing exactly what happened (let's hope it's not the last Windows Update that trashes disks) take what I said with caution.

But the suggestion of deimmunize is noted. I am opening an internal issue for this.

Gjoksi

Hello.

@camarie @Alexandru_BD @dvsls

I agree with the OP.

A simple "unimmunize" or "deimmunize" option would make things very easy for the users, as they don't have to do all the steps written above.

Kruell Bozo

It seemingly bricked my USB drive as well. I can format it, but not add any files to it , and the drive was an empty one. It works after reformatting at least. But maybe the formatting was corrupted already before immunizing it.

John Smythe

Camarie, thanks for your response. I did what you said and looked for those files and directories, but using show hidden files and from the command prompt (as administrator). They are not showing. I've also tried using Linux to format the drive and a low level formatter, but nothing works. I was able to copy the data I have on the SD card so nothing lost but it's unusable now as far as I'm concerned. It can't be written to.

Is it possible that the card was defective just before I used immunizer? I guess all things are possible. If the card had been defective and locked since I last wrote to it, would immunizer have given an error saying it couldn't write to it? There certainly wasn't an error message after immunizer.

I have another SD card and maybe I'll "sacrifice" it and run immunizer on it so see if I can find the files you mention and see if I can then unlock it.

Thanks for your help. If you end up adding an un-immunizer function then it was worth it :-)

camarie

It is possible, although obviously I cannot say for sure.

It might be defective on certain parts, so writing several small files will not be affected, while copying large amount of data is. I would check the Event Viewer for events filtered on Windows Logs\System and
Windows Logs\Application, filtering on Event level: critical, warning, error and checking also the verbose, and from Event sources checking everything with "disk" in the description. Maybe there are reported events reporting controller or write operations error.

The de-immunize feature: I notified the team and filed the internal issue. It will get discussed and if it will get approved, will follow up.

Alinah

Remove the write-protection or sanitized state.

A common method involves using the Diskpart command-line utility to clear the read-only attributes and then re-attempt formatting.

If that fails, you may need to use Linux with a tool like gparted to create a new partition table, or consider if the card is physically corrupted.