Broken Pi

[balanga]

I bought a Raspberry Pi 2 a couple of years ago and it stopped working at some point so I left it in a drawer. The problem with it was that the spring in the microsd holder had broken and when inserting a card it remained loose so I was unable to boot.

Today I came across the unit and just out of iinterest connected a power supply, no card, and the LEDs started blinking. After insertng a card the initial colourful boot screen came up but seemed to go into a boot loop after the raspberry appears. The behaviour seems to depend on how far the card is inserted.

Any suggestions as to what to do with the card?

[Imperf3kt]

Its possible (though probably very difficult) to replace the card holder.

Personally, I'd use blutack to secure the card as far in as possible without being too far in.
You could use some kind of glue too, but then it'd be permanent.

[W. H. Heydt]

The card should be in all the way. You might be able to slip something in as a shim to hold it in place. If you're really good at fine soldering work, you might be able to replace the card holder. Or, of course, you could get another Pi.

And--FYI--SD cards are not "hot swap" in Pis unless it is new enough (Pi3B or Pi2Bv1.2) and has been set to boot off a USB mass storage device or a wired network.

[MaxK1]

You should still get into the habit of sync'ing and umount'ing the the sdcard.