SD card problem

[jammydodger]

Hi all, after some help. Having got my board I've just tried to get it running. I had a 16GB SD Class 4 card available. It had a few old media files on it and was working OK. Using the wheezy image I used dd (I use Ubuntu as my working OS) to copy the .img over. This seemed to work OK and I remembered to sync before removing the card.

When I put it in the board and powered on nothing happened, however. Power LED lit and the HDMI port was outputting a signal according to the HDMI switcher gizmo I use so the hw side seems fine. When I put the card back into the desktop it didn't mount. I could see it in the Disk Utility tool and I could delete the partition although having done that it wouldn't create a file system on the card as it thought it was ro. I've had flakiness before with Linux not recognising removable media before so I booted Windows 7. This found the card and told me it needed formatting to be useable so I let it do that and copied a file to it to confirm that it's working. So in due course I'll boot Linux again and this time I'll try using the GUI image writer instead but if anyone has any ideas as to what could have gone wrong first time around please fire away.

[jammydodger]

Update time. No further forward as I tried using ImageWriter (as administrator) to put the image onto the card and got:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/imagewriter/imagewriter.py", line 112, in do_write
self.raw_write(source, target)
File "/usr/lib/imagewriter/imagewriter.py", line 150, in raw_write
src_size = float(data.stdout.readline().split()[4])*1.0
IndexError: list index out of range

And since zip appeared to be happening on the card I think it safe to assume it fell over in a heap. Much as it goes against the grain it looks like I'll be booting Windows again and trying it that way. All in all today has not been a great advertisement for Linux.

[redhawk]

"This found the card and told me it needed formatting to be useable" - it couldn't have been flashed correctly the boot partition is fat32 and should be accessible from within Windows.

Richard S.

[Jim JKla]

It may just be an SD card gone flaky there have not been many reports of this but there have to be some.

I have run with a range of cards from a £1 BluBox card that I put a copy of Rasbian Razor on up to a 32g Micro I stole temporarily from my partners mp3 player (I put the data back it's ok) all have run OK.

The best results per pound so far were a couple of class 4 x 4g cards I got for 3quid each of e-bay ages ago. One has the Wheezy beta the other the latest image. Both have been re-imaged about 5 times for experimentation.

I've found the best method to prep a card is to format it in my camera.

[jammydodger]

"This found the card and told me it needed formatting to be useable" - it couldn't have been flashed correctly the boot partition is fat32 and should be accessible from within Windows.

Richard S.

Not so, the card was fine. I've just written the image to it using the Windows tool and the RP is now booting quite happily from it. It was ImageWriter and before that dd that failed to do the job. Like I said not a great advert for Linux, though I'm expecting the RP will redress the balance now it's up and running.

[redhawk]

Memory cards do go faulty the fact that it happened while using Linux was purely coincidental.
I've had working USB flash drives go totally dead on me while using Windows so it happens and it's rather unfortunate.

Richard S.

[ramboton]

I don't think the cards are bad, mine is doing the same thing on two different cards, on two different computers. It was working perfectly yesterday, I wonder if there was some update or something that has screwed it up?

[richardgoh]

I am having a nightmare using SD-Cards with the Pi.
Tried Sandisk 4G Class 4, Kingston 4G Class 4.
Some will not boot.
Some will not reboot when warm.
Some will run for a few days then will not boot.
Just what the heck is wrong ?