If your SD card does not already contain a bootable (active) FAT32 partition, you can use the Windows 7 Disk Management utility to create one.
The default Windows formatting option that appears when you insert a blank (or unrecognized) SD card into a Windows PC is not sufficient to format the SD card with a bootable partition. While it can create a DOS/FAT32 partition, it does not provide an option for making this partition "Active", or bootable. If your SD card does not already contain a bootable (active) FAT32 partition, you can create one with the Windows 7 Disk Management utility, as follows:
If the SD card doesn't show the partition as "Active", you will need to set it to active. With many SD cards, all you need to do is:
With some SD cards, however, after you have performed the steps to format the card, the option to Mark Partition as Active will not be available. (It will be greyed out). If this is the case for your SD card, you will need to complete some additional steps to make the bootable FAT32 partition active:
DISKPART> list disk Disk ### Status Size Free Gyn Gpt -------- ------ ---- ---- --- --- Disk 0 Online 40 GB 20 GB Disk 1 No Media 0 B 0 B Disk 2 No Media 0 B 0 B Disk 3 Online 14 GB 0 B
DISKPART > select disk 3 Disk 3 is now the selected disk. DISKPART >
DISKPART > list partition Partition ### Type Size Offset ------------- ------- ------ ------- Partition 1 Primary 14 GB 4096 KB
DISKPART> select partition 1 Partition 1 is now the selected partition. DISKPART>
DISKPART> active DiskPart marked the current partition as active.
DISKPART> list partition Partition ### Type Size Offset ------------- ------- ------ ------- *Partition 1 Primary 14 GB 4096 KB
The "*" beside the partition name indicates that the partition is active. Your SD card should now be ready. You can proceed with copying files to the DOS/FAT32 partition on the disk.