Hi10 Pro – Resolved Windows microSD failure

[Stuart Paterson]

There seems to be no shortage of people on the internet having issues with their microSD cards in chinese tablets. Like a lot of people, mine (an 128gb Patriot) seemed to work fine for a while (accessible as shared storage in both Android and Windows) and then one day I noticed it was no longer visible in Windows. I searched various forums and found instructions on how to install an older version unsigned driver and managed to recover my microSD, only to have it go on the fritz again after switching to Android. After that, I couldn’t get it to work despite having the older (v6.x as opposed to v10.x) driver installed – every time I plugged in my microSD I got error code 10 saying the device couldn’t start.

After experimenting though, I’ve managed to get things working again. In fact, I’ve revived it from the dead twice now using this process (After recovering it the first time, I switched to Android again just to verify it wasn’t just a fluke the first time).

The bad news is, switching to Android seems to mess things up. If I just use windows, my card stays intact and stable, but switching to Android seems to corrupt it for Windows (it still works fine in Android, just not Windows).

So, here’s how I did it, hopefully it can help other people. For starters, boot into your bios and make sure you have the MS CUSTOM SD BUS driver enabled (if you don’t know where that is, a quick google will show you where to find it.) Also in the bios, make sure your SD is in APCI mode, not PCI.

As well, find the steps to install the unsigned older version drivers (again, there are many forums threads covering this).

Now, to get the SD card back to life. I admittedly had to use my home laptop to do this and for the record it’s running Windows XP (hopefully other Windows versions will do the trick, it’s what I had available).

I took my microSD, plugged it into my laptop and then formatted it as NTFS using Minitool Partition Wizard.

NOTE: Although the card is 128gb, it was only showing up as 32gb on my laptop (a limitation of XP?).

NOTE2: Prior to formatting as NTFS, I also tried Fat32 and exFAT. However, in both those cases, when I took the microSD out of my laptop and plugged it into my Hi10, I got error code 10 in Windows.

With NTFS though, no error code 10 and Windows mounted the card. When I first plugged it in, Windows 10 reported the microSD had errors and needed to be error checked. I did this and it reported it fixed things. However, my card was still formatted to be 32gb. I right clicked on it, and selected format. Windows autopopulated a filesystem of NTFS and an allocation size of 4K. I tried formatting my card this way but it failed saying it could not complete. I changed the “allocation size” to “default”, and success!

So, a bit of a pain to get it back to life, but it’s completely stable in Windows as long as I don’t switch to Android. I think I may look into removing Android and absorbing the RemixOS into Windows…

Anyways, good luck, and let me know if this helps anyone.

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