Found my old R4 card in the sofa earlier today, and I tried booting it up in my DS but I get a "SD/TF Card Error". I clean it off, place it in my PC and Windows says I need to format it. I'm like "lol ok" and press yes. It fails. I look and it says it's 31mb. I say "wat" and type in "diskmgmt.msc" in the find box. Disk Management says it's 30.6mb, and a healthy main partition. I clensed the micro SD again but get the same result. I see no signs of visible corrosion and the likes, so what's up?
I've had this before with my R4. It was likely corrupted beforehand and you formatted it wrong, or it's just shagged for good.
I stopped being cheap and bought a new MicroSD. Or well my grandpa did. He got me three of them, so that's cool. Moar games I guess.