8GB SD not booting.

[Mickety]

Hey there, Raspberry community.

I have a problem and I can't pinpoint a source of it.

Quick description:

1 - I have a 4GB SD card and a 8GB SD card.
2- I tried burning Jessie Lite on both cards with Etcher. On "Validation" stage it always said "Image was burned on SD card but it cannot be read to be validated".
3 - I started running Etcher as admin and both image burning and just uploading NOOBS dist is working on my 4GB memory card (sadly I can't install desktop GUI on it because it's only 4GBs).
4 - Validation error still persists on 8GB one. (Etcher. Windisk32 doesn't show any errors but RPZ doesn't boot either way.)
5 - I checked 8GB with card MiniTool Partition Wizard for errors - all sectors and SD card appears to be fully functional but somehow nothing happens when I plug in my RPZ into USB on my computer for power - no leds turning on and the monitor doesn't show me the booting up process. If I put my 4GB SD with burnt Jessie Lite - everything is fine.

I formatted it to FAT32, exFAT (which should work AFAIK) and even split it into two FAT (4GBs cluster, prime and logical) to try if it will work that way but to no success.

What do I do? Throw away that brand new SD card? It is functional - I can upload pics, vids and so on, and MiniTool PW didn't find any errors.
Tried using search engine on both google and this forum to no avail - google just doesn't have any info on this matter and this forum doesn't allow you to search for words "card" and "sd" because one is too common and the other one is less than 3 letters long.

Thanks.

[wh7qq]

What is the brand and source of your uSD cards? Many counterfeit cards are out in the retail stream, especially on auction sites. Go for Samsung, SanDisk, Kingston or other name brand from a reputable source that will accept returns. Check all new cards with h2testw, a free utility, to be sure that they are what they claim to be.

If the uSD cards were OK to start with, it sounds like they are corrupt now. Try to reformat with SDFormatter (another free utility), and I believe you need to use the partition size adjustment. I am not sure why you mess with exFAT on those small uSD cards...just use FAT32. The 4G card is probably too small for current Noobs or Raspbian loads. Use the 4G card for a camera or smart phone or something and don't bother with anything smaller than 8G, Class 10 cards for the RPi.

[Mickety]

What is the brand and source of your uSD cards? Many counterfeit cards are out in the retail stream, especially on auction sites. Go for Samsung, SanDisk, Kingston or other name brand from a reputable source that will accept returns. Check all new cards with h2testw, a free utility, to be sure that they are what they claim to be.

If the uSD cards were OK to start with, it sounds like they are corrupt now. Try to reformat with SDFormatter (another free utility), and I believe you need to use the partition size adjustment. I am not sure why you mess with exFAT on those small uSD cards...just use FAT32. The 4G card is probably too small for current Noobs or Raspbian loads. Use the 4G card for a camera or smart phone or something and don't bother with anything smaller than 8G, Class 10 cards for the RPi.

It's a Kingston SD card. Bought it in Thailand on a street market, looks like it was made in Taiwan



Will try the h2testw tool, SDFormatter didn't help but maybe I didn't use it properly.

[RaTTuS]

...

It's a Kingston SD card. Bought it in Thailand on a street market, looks like it was made in Taiwan
....

90% sure it will be fake

[fanoush]

Many counterfeit cards are out in the retail stream, especially on auction sites.

Indeed

Check all new cards with h2testw, a free utility, to be sure that they are what they claim to be.

there is also a http://www.rmprepusb.com/tutorials/-fak ... eFlashTest which is much faster. It corrupts the filesystem so reformat is needed but writes only to some sector across the card to spot the fake card much faster.

I recently got some ultra cheap 8GB and 4GB cards on ebay (2.21, 2.49 USD a piece) and all 4 I got were fake with approx 100-200MB real flash!

fake8gb.JPG (60.17 KiB) Viewed 849 times

I got them on purpose (and I got money back so they were free in the end) because I wanted only small card to fit firmware/kernel/initrd or some bare metal stuff. Previously I got plain SD (not SDHC) cards of various sizes (128,256MB) and the boot ROM won't boot them. It simply won't load bootcode.bin at all from such small cards. So the fake card is ideal for experimenting with bare metal code like https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware

[Mickety]

I checked it with h2testw and here is the result. It appears there were problems with SD after all. Just got a new one - thanks for the suggestions! it was formatted to FAT32

Code: Select all

Warning: Only 7846 of 7847 MByte tested.
The media is likely to be defective.
115.8 MByte OK (237175 sectors)
7.5 GByte DATA LOST (15831433 sectors)
Details:0 KByte overwritten (0 sectors)
0 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors)
7.5 GByte corrupted (15831433 sectors)
0 KByte aliased memory (0 sectors)
First error at offset: 0x00000000073cee00
Expected: 0x00000000073cee00
Found: 0x00eacdb7c0f37e57
H2testw version 1.3
Writing speed: 7.68 MByte/s
Reading speed: 14.5 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4