How to unlock a SanDisk SD card with no physical lock mechanialism?

i tried the tape and then it wouldnt fit in my camera

andy
January 2011

thank you sooo much!!
my camera solved now!Tried the tape but it got stuck in the camera :S I used a tiny piece of wood from an ice lolly stick and it worked like a charm.
thanks again!

N.M.E
April 2010

Those detailed mesurements were very informative. Tried the tape method and it worked!!! Who knew scotch tape was as useful as duct tape! Thanks for the help!

Hopeful
January 2010

This is an easy problem to solve. the SD type card has a slider to one side that you slide away from the pins to lock it's contents. Unfortunately on some of the cheaper and some sandisk cards the slider breaks and falls off/inside the card. The purpose of this slider is so that the device reading it can decide whether or not it can write to the card. Much like the write protect on the old floppies it has no physical link to anything within the card its purely to tell the device how it should deal with the card.

The fix is simple, some say that tape over the indent on that side of the card will work, but you will need strong tape and this will fail with use as it is constantly under pressure from the write protect sensor arm in the device reading/writing the card. I've found that the best fix is to cut a bit of rigid plastic about 1.5mm thick by 4mm wide by 8mm long and using that to fill the entire indent on the side of the card, either by holding this in place with a bit of electrical tape or a more permanent way with super glue.

The plastic i used was from one of those white anti theft tabs they stick to most cd's at HMV.

Hope this helps most of you, unfortunately this wont sort out software locks but should solve the majority of SD write problems.

Avar Linqui
August 2009

Tried it and that didn't work.

Jeremy
April 2008

put some tape on the side, covering the part where the switch usually is.

Roberto Arbeláez
March 2008