SD Card Shows Wrong Size: How to Restore Full Capacity of SD Card Without Losing Files

Issue: SD card not showing full capacity

"I bought a SanDisk 8GB micro SD card about a year ago. This morning, I transferred the photos on the SD card to another location on my Windows 10 PC to free up some space. When I checked its properties later, it showed only about 500 MB available. Is this possible? I thought it should still be 8GB."

Common causes:

As for us, the SD card showing wrong size issue mainly boils down to three aspects.

1. 1. A cheap, defective SD card purchased from an unreliable vendor
2. 2. Incompatibility with the card reader or host device
3. 3. Infected by computer viruses

Recover Data from SD Card Before Formatting in UTF-8

As we've mentioned several times, formatting should be done with care, as it will erase all data from the disk, leaving you with a blank SD card. If you don't have a backup, this data will be lost forever.

Hence, we highly recommend you retrieve files from SD card in advance. Tool Data Recovery software is renowned for its ability to recover data from all devices including HDD, SSD, SD card, USB flash drive, pen drive, external hard drive, and so on.

It can recover all types of files from your SD card. Plus, if the files are corrupted, the Tool Data Recovery software can also help you fix corrupted videos, photos, and documents.

Please follow these steps to retrieve files from the SD card.

Step 1. Connect your SD card, memory card, or CF card to the computer and launch the memory card recovery software on the PC. The SD card will be listed under "Devices". Select the SD card and click "Scan" to start searching for lost data.

Step 2: The software will automatically start scanning. The scan is powerful enough to find all lost files, even those without file names. Once the scan is finished, you can find your deleted items in the tree-view panel on the left. Then, if you're looking for a specific type of file such as photos, documents, videos, or emails, click on "Filter."

Step 3: You can preview the contents of files by double-clicking them. Then, select the files you need and hit "Recover" to restore them to a secure location on your computer or any other external storage device.

How to Restore an SD Card to Its Full Size

After ruling out these incompatibility issues, you need to perform a quick format to restore the SD card to its full working size.

There are some good free SD card formatter tools available for Windows 10/8.1/8/7. Choose one that you find easy to use and convenient.

Method 1: Disk Management

Step 1: Right-click on "My Computer"/"Computer" and select Manage.

Step 2. In Device Manager, go to Disk Management, find your SD card, right-click on it, and select "Format..."

Step 3. Rename and format the SD card's file system to NTFS or FAT32 as needed. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the process.

Your SD card's storage space should now be fully restored, and you can use it to store and save files and data once again.

Method 2: Using a Disk Formatting Utility

This is a third-party free partition manager, so you need to download and install it on your computer first, then follow the guide to format the SD card.

Step 1: Right-click on the hard drive partition and select the "Format" option.

Step 2: In the dialog that appears, set the volume label, file system, and cluster size for the partition, then click OK.

Step 3: A warning window will appear; click "Yes" to continue.

4. Click the "Run 1 Task" button and then click "Apply" to begin formatting the hard drive partition.

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Method 3: Use the DiskPart Command-Line Tool

Step 1: Type “cmd” in the Windows 10 search box, and you'll see “Command Prompt” as the top match. Right-click it, and select “Run as administrator.”

Step 2: Type diskpart at the command prompt, and press Enter.

Step 3: Type the command list disk and press "Enter" to list all available disks.

Step 4. Type select disk followed by the number of the storage device (for example, select disk 0) to choose the SD card you want to format, and press Enter.

Step 5. Type clean to erase the selected SD card, and press «Enter».

Step 6: Type create partition primary to create a primary partition, and then hit Enter:

Step 7. Type format fs=ntfs (or format fs=exfat) and press Enter to format the drive with NTFS or exFAT.

Step 8. Type assign letter=driveletter (for example, assign letter=E) to specify a drive letter, and then press Enter.