Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC) cards are flash memory-based cards with the storage capacity ranging from 4 GB to 32 GB. The newer specification of SDHC cards allow for storage capacity greater than 32 GB. At times, you may encounter problems while accessing these cards with Windows XP-based computer. Such situations occur when the logical structure of the card gets corrupt. Due to corruption, all your saved photos and other multimedia files become inaccessible. Though, you can restore lost data using a backup, you cannot be sure of complete recovery. Fortunately, to sail through such situations, many SD card recovery software are available in market today.

Consider a scenario, wherein, you connect an SDHC card that has a capacity of 16 GB to Windows XP-based computer in order to transfer pictures and other files, and instead receive the following error:

“Disk is not formatted.
The disk in drive Letter is not formatted.
Do you want to format it now?”

As a result of the above error, the computer is not able to read the card.

Cause

The above error haunts you in the following circumstances:

• If the SDHC card has a capacity of more than 8GB and it uses the FAT32X file system

• If the SDHC card is corrupt

Resolution

If you are encountering the error message because of any of the above-mentioned causes, you would be required to follow these steps:

• Download the hotfix 934428 for Windows XP which adds support for SDHC cards that have a capacity of more than 4 GB.

• In case of SDHC card corruption, you must re-format it. Formatting installs a new file system in the card and makes it reusable. You can then restore the lost data – photos and videos – from an updated backup. However, if no backup is available, you must download an SD card recovery utility.

These third-party professional tools employ sophisticated algorithms and retrieve data from a formatted SDHC card in an efficient manner. Make sure, you download a read-only SD card recovery utility which does not modify the original data.

Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is a comprehensive application which recovers lost or deleted photos, audios, videos and other multimedia files from multiple SDHC card brands including Lexar, Transcend, SanDisk and more. The SD card recovery software recovers all audio (WMA, WAV, MP3), video(AVI,WMV, MP4) and photo (JPEG, TIF, PNG) formats in three simple steps viz select, scan and save.