SD (Secure Digital) is a popular flash memory card used in different portable devices. SD cards can be formatted to FAT, FAT32, NTFS and exFAT file system on top of MBR partitioning scheme. But at times, when attempting to access these cards through a Windows based system, you might fail to do so. This might occur if the logical structure of the card is corrupted. Thus, to restore the lost photos and other digital files, you will need to use your backup. Photo Recovery applications are powerful tools that can recover lost data while no clean backup is available.

For an instance, when you attempt to access an SD card inserted into its respective slot on a Windows XP based computer, you might fail with the below error displaying on screen:

"The disk in drive X is not formatted."

You cannot access the card even on further attempts of reinserting and accessing the card.

Cause

Among other reasons responsible for this problem, some of them are listed below:

Sdbus.sys or SecureDigital Bus Driver is the one that abstracts host controller physical implementation in order to provide client driver a method of sending commands to the SD card despite of bus topology in use. The error like above can occur when this driver uses high-speed mode and the SD card doesn't support the same.

SD card is not formatted

SD card is logically crashed

Solution

You need to use the following methods to solve such issues:

The issue of high-speed used by Sdbus.sys driver has been resolved in the corresponding hotfix of Windows XP. Thus, you need to download it.

For Windows XP to recognize the unformatted card, you need to format it

To fix logical corruption of card, you should reformat the card and restore lost data from backup.

If no clean data backup is available after reformatting the card, you should use Photo Recovery Software. These are commercial recovery tools designed to provide you with powerful scanning algorithms, comprehensive Photo Recovery results, interactive user interface and advanced options.

Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is a premier Photo Recovery Software to recover lost photos, videos, and audios. The software is available in two forms for Windows (Windows Vista, XP, 2003, and 2000) and Mac (Mac OS X 10.5.x Leopard, 10.4.x Tiger, 10.3.9 Panther). It supports recovery from all digital media cards, hard drives and cameras.