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Steve Dec 11, 2023 @ 2:39am

SDcard wiped!

I have a 1tb sdcard in my Steam Deck. Had it in there about 4-5 months and I had about 22-25 games on it ...until last night.

I went to load a game and it was showing the install button not the play one and then I noticed an sdcard icon at the top of the screen, so I went to settings/storage and it's asking me to format the card.

it's named the card "16_ _ _" and says 931.4gb free of 931.4gb and says "to use this drive with the steam deck first it needs to be formatted".

is there any way of restoring it and getting my games back?

I don't want to format it and start installing games because it might be wiped again, what causes this??

Last edited by Steve; Dec 11, 2023 @ 2:39am

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Showing 1-9 of 9 comments

PopinFRESH Dec 11, 2023 @ 3:28am

Are you looking at this in desktop mode or game mode?

Have you tried, while booted into game mode, ejecting the microSD card and then waiting a few seconds and re-inserting the microSD card.

There has been a bug which seems to be with the auto-mount system on SteamOS 3.5.5+ which has been causing microSD cards which are already formatted to show up at an odd mount point like SD01 and show as 30.6MB in size. As such your issue may be somewhat different. Did you tell it to reformat it at all previously? or have you done anything with the card in desktop mode in something like KDE Partition Manager?

Steve Dec 11, 2023 @ 3:59am

Tried game and desktop mode. also tried putting it in my computer and using sdcard software to test it, it's not even registering at all. Nope, I've not formatted it since I bought it and I've not done anything apart from install games onto it.

PopinFRESH Dec 11, 2023 @ 4:06am

Originally posted by Steve:
...also tried putting it in my computer and using sdcard software to test it...

Which sdcard software are you referring to in regards to testing it? When you connected it to your other computer (assuming Windows PC?) were there any prompts that showed up?

Many testing software are data-destructive in nature.

Steve Dec 11, 2023 @ 4:10am

No prompts showed at all and as for software I tried using Aja systerm test, H2testw and flash memory toolkit. Nothing shows at all, I think the card is fubar but its only 5 or so months old. how weird!

PopinFRESH Dec 11, 2023 @ 4:34am

Originally posted by Steve:
No prompts showed at all and as for software I tried using Aja systerm test, H2testw and flash memory toolkit. Nothing shows at all, I think the card is fubar but its only 5 or so months old. how weird!

Which card is it (make/model)?

All of those tests will destroy the data on the microSD card btw. They write a known data pattern to the disk and then attempt to read-back the data to ensure the reported flash capacity is actually present on the device.

However, if they aren't detecting the microSD card then they shouldn't have done anything with it. That also doesn't necessarily mean it isn't being detected by the system.

Attempt to do Clone Backup of Your microSD Card

If you have some USB-C backup storage medium (e.g. an external HDD or similar) then you can try to clone the microSD card as a backup before trying to mess with it further.

Boot the Steam Deck to desktop mode
Insert the microSD card and see if it shows up in KDE Partition Manager (don't do anything to it other than note the block device name).
Connect your USB-C backup disk (assuming it is formatted with ExFAT or other accessible file format)
Mount the external disks filesystem
Then attempt to clone the block device for the microSD card to an image file on the external filesystem wherever you mounted it.

sudo dd if=/dev/microSDcard_block_device_name of=/path/of/external/filesystem/micorSD-backup.img bs=512

Note: Be cautious with using the dd utility via konsole and ensure you understand what it is doing as it will not hold your hand, and it can be data destructive if you accidentally tell it to do so

Try to Wipe and Re-Test microSD Card

Once you've tried to backup the card you can try to nuke the disk, ensuring you wipe the partition table, etc. which may be resulting in it not being seen correctly in Windows, or other programs.

As noted above in the backup section; once you are booted in desktop mode with the microSD card inserted; and you know the block device name for the microSD card, you can use the dd utility to completely wipe the disk.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/microSDcard_block_device_name bs=512

This will write zeros (0) to the disk overwriting anything on the disk across all sectors of the disk. After this completes then try re-inserting it into your Windows PC and seeing if you can run H2testw on it again.

If it passes H2testw then re-insert it into your Steam Deck and try to re-format it in Game mode.

If that works then you can look into trying to mount the clone image file you created so you can attempt to recover any data that was still accessible on the disk (if any). If they were just Steam Games then you can just re-download them and that will probably be far quicker and substantially easier than trying to recover them.

Blackwind121 Apr 14, 2024 @ 10:48pm

This exact issue just happened to me with a new 1TB SD card! I even got the "16___" name!
It now shows up in game mode and says I need to format it, but I get an error when I try to. It will not show up in Desktop mode. This card is literally 3 days old so there's no reason for it to be doing this.