This describes my scenario exactly - right down to not wanting to do the exchange. I have tried the SD formatter listed in the replies and I chose the options full erase and full overwrite. This is when the micro SD is in a USB stick with no write protect switch. I also put it in the SanDisk full SD sized adapter and made sure the switch was set to write. I tried the switch in the other direction - multiple times and nothing works. The SD formatter says it is write protected and Windows simply tries formatting for a while and eventually fails. I tried a low-level formatting program and it just gave error after error. Any ideas?