Is there anywhere? Or anyone who can fix this ?

[JHarden92]

Im not sure what has happened. it wasnt booting, so i took it apart, went to take the SD card and it pinged off. Now i have a non working PI

Is there anywhere i can send this for someone to fix it? Dont want £100 going down the drain.

I was only trying to put some more games on it, but ive somehow massively broken it.

[mahjongg]

The metal lid of the card slot can be soldered back on, on the four solder points on its corners, by a competent person, but such damage doesn't happen with normal handling, it commonly only happens when people take the PI out of a case, and forget to remove the card before they do it.

if you are talking about the retropie, you can add new ROM's without removing the SD-card at all, using the normal procedure of inserting an empty USB drive, waiting a few minutes, for the PI to create file structures (directories) on the thumb drive, then taking it out and putting it in your PC to put new ROM's in the (right) created directory, then once more inserting the thumb drive into the RPI and wait for the PI to copy the ROM's to the SD-card. After restarting retropie the new games will be present.

if your SD-card was overwritten, and didn't boot anymore, please create a new version of retopie from a retropie image, written with Etcher to the card. But note that this will erase everything from the card including all your emulator ROM's.

read the boot problem sticky in beginners if you have trouble with booting.

The sd-card can get corrupted if you power down too soon after a shutdown., of if you don't do a shutdown.

[B.Goode]

What model of RPi board is it? Maybe it is useable without a micro SD card slot?

No model of RPi board is currently priced at £100

You don't give a location: are you anywhere that might have a regular Raspberry Jam meeting, or a more neutral HackSpace?

[rpiMike]

You could try pressing it back in place then using hot glue to fix in place.

[mahjongg]

Better not use hot glue, but if you MUST then don't insert the card while you do, and use -very- tiny amounts, (use a toothpick) and only on the four places where you otherwise would be soldering the metal to the pads on the board. Try fixating the metal in place precisely with sellotape before adding minuscule drops of glue to the edges of the metal lips, so the glue will wick under it. Too much glue and you will make matters worse. not glued on straight and it won't work.

Also Cyanoacrylate fumes are poisonous, and soldering afterwards also won't work anymore due to the glue, so you can't later try soldering. Meaning be sure that you cannot solder it back on, as once you try superglue, and it fails that is it.....


if all else fails, you can try to press the card onto the contacts and hold it in place with a clothespin, the ones with a metal spring.

[trejan]

No model of RPi board is currently priced at £100

It sounds like it is a premade emulator kit with a large number of legitimately acquired *cough* ROMs included.

[mahjongg]

No model of RPi board is currently priced at £100

It sounds like it is a premade emulator kit with a large number of legitimately acquired *cough* ROMs included.

Could be, the sd-card shows traces of glue, perhaps the card was glued in, a very evil practice, but as i said you don't have to take the card out to update the romset.
But if the card is corrupted you are fubared.

especially because overwriting the card will erase all your precious ROM sets, I hope you have backups.

[gordon77]

What model of RPi board is it? Maybe it is useable without a micro SD card slot?

No model of RPi board is currently priced at £100

You don't give a location: are you anywhere that might have a regular Raspberry Jam meeting, or a more neutral HackSpace?

Looks like a 3B to me.

[JHarden92]

How would it run without an SD card?

I bought a Retrobox from a company, it was pre loaded with around 5000 games, I managed to add and remove games in the past but had forgotten how.

I’m in Kent, UK.

I don’t trust myself soldering, will probably make it worse, is there anyone/anywhere I could sent it to get fixed? Or an alternative method of using it?

[B.Goode]

How would it run without an SD card?

I bought a Retrobox from a company, it was pre loaded with around 5000 games, I managed to add and remove games in the past but had forgotten how.

I’m in Kent, UK.

I don’t trust myself soldering, will probably make it worse, is there anyone/anywhere I could sent it to get fixed? Or an alternative method of using it?

So is this a tacit confirmation that this is an RPi3b board?


If you can get the board to boot from a microSD card just once then you could use this Raspberry Pi documentation to enable booting from usb mass storage, such as a usb 'memory stick' or your existing microSD card in a usb card reader.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentati ... des/msd.md


Maybe carefully holding the card in place by hand would be sufficient for this one-off modification.

[B.Goode]

How would it run without an SD card?

I bought a Retrobox from a company, it was pre loaded with around 5000 games, I managed to add and remove games in the past but had forgotten how.

I’m in Kent, UK.

I don’t trust myself soldering, will probably make it worse, is there anyone/anywhere I could sent it to get fixed? Or an alternative method of using it?

In the past there have been Raspberry Jam events in Margate, Broadstairs, Sittingbourne, Rochester, and Sevenoaks. So there are other Raspberry Pi enthusiasts in your area.

Someone with a little experience of soldering could provide a working but untidy solution by joing the 'fingers' of the card reader to the corresponding contacts of a full-size SD-to-microSD adapter. This doesn't need specific Raspberry Pi knowledge or expertise.