K guys n gals. This is getting to me. I have about 5 SD cards that when I put them in cams it comes up as "card locked". My card reader won't let me format them. I've checked and the little slide button are correct. Any advice?
Cards don't last forever. Unfortunately I have had that happen as well. I replace cards every few years.
Is the card reader you are referring to one of those stand-alone card viewers or one that connects to a phone for checking the cards? If that’s the case, try taking them back home and putting them into a card reader that’s connected to an actual computer and see if they can be formatted there. A lot of times those have more capability to read and format cards that have data corruption compared to the little portable field style card readers. Also, there are some specialized programs meant for data recovery that can read and possibly format damaged cards that the formatting software that’s build in doesn’t recognize. Disk Drill and EaseUs are two of the programs I know of and both have a free version that is adequate for what you’re trying to do.
Also, I am making the assumption that these are all cards which you have previously used in cams successfully. If that isn't the case then it is worth mentioning that most cams only support cards with a max size of 32gb. Some of the nicer cameras can take 64gb cards and some really high end ones will even let you use 128gb or more, but as a general rule of thumb 32gb is usually the maximum size card that’ll work in a trail cam. Also if you use a Mac computer to format the cards then you have to make sure that you change the filesystem format setting in disk utility to FAT-32. The default filesystem setting is Mac OS and that file system, as well as the exFAT file system, doesn’t play nicely with most trail cameras. I’m think that Microsoft windows formats them using the FAT-32 filesystem by default but it’s been a long ass time since I last formatted an SD card on a winders computer so if that’s what you’re using then you probably ought to confirm that hasn’t changed and FAT-32 is still the default format.
Just double check the cameras compatibility with cards. As technology advances, you cant use your 2gb cards at a low write speed to keep up. You also cant use a crazy high capacity card with some cameras. Brownings tend to like 4-32gb class 10's.
The SD card thing can be frustrating for sure. I actually bought two cards and labeled them both to be used only in the same camera every time. No issues so far.
Where you ever able to get them to work? Sounds like you need to do a factory reset on the cards through your computer. Essentially it is just reformatting but you will lose everything on them.
