Memory card not recognised by Sansa Clip+

Hello everyone.

I have a Kingston 128gb memory card, which had all of my music on it, until yesterday.  I removed it from my Rockboxed Sandisk Clip Plus and put it in my computer to transfer an album to it.  The transfer seemed to go OK, until I re-inserted the card back into the player to use it.  The player didn’t recognise the card.  It had been working fine prior to me adding the extra album to it, but it’s not working at all now.  I have done a quick format with it, but every time I try a full format/wipe, it always fails.  I’ve tried various sd card format programs, with the same result.  I checked the player using a smaller card, which worked fine, with no issues.  I have formatted the 128gb card to ExFat.

The Clip+ can/will only read FAT32. It was built long before the new larger exFAT system was introduced. Not sure why it previously read the card.

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My husband has the same player with the same type of card.  His is working fine, formatted to ExFat.  I will reformat the card to FAT32 and see if that helps.  I will come back here afterwards and let you know either way.  Thank you for your help @Tapeworm.

I don’t see how I can format such a large card to FAT32.  When I set up Rockbox, I had to format the card to exFAT so that the device could work with it, and copy the music, etc.

PROBLEM SORTED - THANK YOU!

I managed to format the card to FAT32 using the program below:

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?guiformat.htm

The card was formatted in seconds, and I copied a test album, before taking the plunge and copying everything over.  The test album copied fine, and I am now syncing my entire music collection to the SD card.

hi there…i was having the same problem as you having bought a new sd card and it not being recognised…downloaded the program you mentioned and boom it works and now sees the files…many thanks!!

You don’t need to download any program from any site.

This can be done using a USB MicroSD card reader. (IF you have a MicroSD card reader on your PC you don’t need the USB 3.0 SD/MicroSD card reader )

I bought a USB 3.0 SD/MicroSD card reader from my local electronics store (fry’s ) for $10. They run $4 - $15 Amazon.

Place the MicroSD card into the USB stick and then plug it into a USB port into your pc.

I am using windows 7 This also works on Windows 10.

You need to know how to get to ’ CMD ’  If you don’t know, search the web or youtube.

In windows 7, I simply hit start button bottom left of my screen.

In the search bar:

Type CMD, Right click the result and Run as Administrator

OR

Type CMD hold CTRL + SHIFT keys down, and press ENTER

A window will open asking if you want to run the following program, Click YES

The black window Command Prompt window opens.

My Hard Drive is " C ". so in that command prompt it will say 

C:\Windows\system32>

If you didn’t run CMD as Administrator, it will say ;

C:\Users\myname>

You want it to be C:\Windows\system32> because you then know your running CMD in administrator mode.

OK Hard part over… next…

next to C:\Windows\system32> you will start typing commands here

NOTE: number 4,

When you type list disk in number 3, it will list disks on your pc.

Disk on the PC will include your opperating system hard drive… Lets say your PC Hard Drive is C and it is 250gb.

When you ‘list disk’ it will show you Disk 0 248gb or something like that.

It will show you Disk 1 29gb.

Notice the smaller disk is the 32gb MicroSD card, and the PC hard drive of 248 is the 250gb pc hard drive.

Understand the difference?

If you want, you can run CMD and diskpart without the MicroSD card placed into the pc, take note of the ‘list disk’ result… then put the MicroSD card in and run diskpart, then ‘list disk’ to see the difference in results.

This is not hard. this is easy to do. If you want to do it in the middle of being in diskpart, simply type exit, press enter, exit, press enter .

DO NOT select your PC hard drive!!

When you go to step 4, and type ’ select disk 1 ’ (if the MicroSD card is disk 1) then you are commanding to work on disk 1.

IF you chose the PC hard drive by accident, just type  exit  and press enter, type  exit and press enter… start over.

When you get to step 5 and type ‘clean’… you erase that assigned disk. :) 

I would never download a 3rd party program to do this, when you have full control here.

  1. Open and run CMD as Administrator.

  2. Type  Diskpart , press Enter.

  3. Type  List Disk , press Enter.

  4. Type  Select Disk #  (where  #  is the number your USB 3.0 MicroSD/SD Card Reader shows up as), press Enter.

  5. Type  Clean , press Enter.

  6. Type  Create Partition Primary , press Enter.

  7. Type  Active , press Enter.

  8. Type  Format Quick FS=FAT32 , press Enter.

  9. Type  Assign , press Enter.

  10. Type  Exit , press Enter.

  11. Type  Exit , press Enter.

number 8, if you want exfat, type  Format Quick FS=exFat , press Enter.

OR for NTFS type  Format Quick FS=NTFS , press Enter.

Diskpart - is a tool that CMD offers to work on disks in the pc

List Disk - shows you the disks connected to the PC

Select Disk - tells Diskpart what Disk to work on.

Clean - erases a disk

Create Partition Primary… or (creat part prim) - creates a partition as primary 

Active - activates the disk ( I think )

Format FS= or Format Quick FS= formats the disk as the format you chose

Assign - Assigns a number to the disk ( I think ) 

Exit gets you out of ‘Diskpart’

Exit gets you out of CMD