If you’re like most people, you probably use your Raspberry Pi to do a lot of things. But did you know that you can also use it to store photos, music, and movies? In this article, we’ll show you how to reclaim the full capacity of your SD card in Windows so that you can use it for all of your Pi projects. First, make sure that your Raspberry Pi is connected to the internet. Then open up Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder where your Raspberry Pi is installed. Next, right-click on the folder and select “Properties.” In the “General” tab, click on the “Size” button and enter the size of your SD card in MB (or GB). Make sure that the “Auto-grow” box is checked so that Windows will automatically resize any new files that are added to this folder. Now let’s move on to our tutorial! First, download an application called Win32 Disk Imager from Microsoft’s website. This program will allow us to write files to our SD card without having to reformat it. Once you have downloaded Win32 Disk Imager, double-click on it to open it up. Next, click on the “File” menu and select “New.” In the new window, select “Drive Letter:” and then enter a letter for your SD card (for example: C). Next, click on the “Browse” button and select your SD card from your computer’s list of drives. Finally, click on the “Write” button and wait until Win32 Disk Imager has finished writing all of your files onto your SD card. That’s all there is to it! Now you can use your Raspberry Pi as normal and store all of your photos, music, and movies onto its SD card without having to worry about space restrictions anymore. ..

If you’ve used an SD card for more advanced purposes than simply storing digital photos (e.g. running a mobile or micro OS), you’ll find it requires a little more finesse than simply formatting the card to reclaim all the space. Read on as we show you how.

Don’t worry Suffering, we grabbed a card we’d previously used for a Pi project just to recreate your situation and show you  how to get the full capacity of your card back. The heart of the problem is the partition changes the SD card undergoes during the initial PI setup: 64MB of the card is reserved as a Windows-accessible FAT32 partition which hosts configuration files and other small files that benefit from cross-OS FAT32-based accessibility (so you can easily pop the SD card in a modern PC and tweak those configuration files) and the rest is formatted for use by Raspbian, which is a Debian-derived version of Linux. As a result, the majority of the card becomes somewhat of a black hole to Windows.

I followed along with one of your great Raspberry Pi tutorials a few months ago. Just recently I upgraded to a bigger SD card for the Pi and pulled the old one to use for another project. When I went to reformat the card only 64MB out of the original capacity was available and even when I went into Disk Management in Windows the best I could do is dump the contents of the inaccessible (and presumably Linux-filled) partition. This left me with a tiny Windows accessible partition and a big phantom partition I can’t do anything with.

I’m sure there’s a simple fix but I’m not even sure if I did a good job describing my problem (so as you an imagine I’m at a loss for what to search for in Google to get to the bottom of things!) Help!

Sincerely,

Suffering from Stunted SD Card

That said, it’s easy to repair when you have the right tool at your fingertips. First, let’s take a peek at what the SD card looks like if you attempt to reclaim the space using Disk Manager as you did:

You can format the tiny 64M FAT32 partition, but the remainder of the SD card remains “Unallocated” after you dump the existing (and inaccessible) Linux partition. No amount of pushing or shoving in the Disk Manager application is going to fix this problem. Instead, we’re going to turn to the simple and effective DISKPART tool.

Open up the Start Menu and type “diskpart” in the run box. Press enter. You’ll be prompted by the Windows UAC to authorize admin access to the DISKPART tool.

A command-prompt-like window will open up, only the prompt will say “DISKPART”. At that prompt, type “list disk”.

In the list output on our machine you can see the computer’s hard drive (119GB) and the removable SD card (14GB). It is absolutely critical you note the proper disk number. DISKPART commands are immediate and without any warning. If you type in the wrong disk number, you’re going to have a really bad time.

After identifying your SD card’s disk number, enter the following command “select disk #” where # is the disk number of your SD card.

Whatever commands you execute after this point will only make changes to the selected disk; now would be a good time to double check you’ve selected the right disk just to be extra safe.

Next, now enter the command “clean”

The clean command zeroes out the sectors of the disk that contain the partition data. If you wished to zero out all data on the SD card you could use “clean all” instead, but unless you have a pressing privacy/security reason for overwriting the the entire SD card with zeros, it’s unwise to waste the read/write cycles of the flash media.

After cleaning the disk, enter the following command “create partition primary”

The command, as the syntax implies, creates a new partition on the disk and sets it to primary. After creating the primary partition, the entire storage capacity of the SD card should be available to Windows. If we peek back into Disk Manager, we no longer see a tiny partition with a huge hunk of unallocated space, but a large partition ready to be formatted:

That’s all there is to it! A little DISKPART wizardy and the SD card is factory fresh again.