Can't Format SD Card after Immunization

John Smythe

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

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.