SD Card Burning problem

[chocorem]

Hello,

 

I'm running a banana pro on the last armbian without any issues on a 16 gb SD Card.

 

I wanted to make a try on a 64 gb card and burn the image on it, I think something went wrong, but now I cannot format or burn anything on the SD card, it says that the media is write protected. I tried to wipe out using parted or some tutos I saw creating an additional Registry key, but nothing worked ! Is my SD broken ?

 

Thanks

 

Greg

[Technicavolous]

Try SDFormatter for Windows ... I know, WIndows.  (or Mac) But it comes from the SD Association and it has an option to resize the partition to its native capacity. Many of these SBC images once written to the SD make partitions that make the SD card look smaller to the OS.

 

The SD Association says many OS file utilities don't do the SD card right. An argument for others, but I have found this formatter has brought back SD cards others couldn't -

 

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/index.html

 

So *any* time I burn a new image using Rufus or Win32DiskImager or whatever, first I use SDFormatter and select the resize option. Never have any problems!

 

I haven't found a way to format the protected area yet, but that doesn't affect your partition size anyway.

 

 

[tkaiser]

it says that the media is write protected.

 

In case you use an Micro SD card to SD card adapter check whether this has a physical write protect switch on the side (just like classic SD cards have). 

 

SD Formatter is useless or only needed when dealing with Raspberry Pi and NOOBS since the RPi SoC's VideoCore GPU boots Raspberries and is so old/primitive that it can only deal with FAT16/FAT32 while larger SDXC cards are pre-formatted with exFAT --> the RPi can not deal with. So the only use case for SD Formatter is being an RPi user trying to use NOOBS since this requires formatting cards with FAT32 to store the multi-boot stuff there. No other SBCs are affected and no other booting scenario. It's only about Raspberries together with NOOBS.

 

Any other pre-formatting or stuff like this is 100 percent waste of time since an OS image always contains an own partition table and will overwrite what SD Formatter did a few moments before immediately when starting to burn the image.

 

Since we're talking here about Armbian: We know what we do, we deal with partitioning on a regular basis to improve things, our OS images ship as small as possible and will be resized to the card's size on first boot (using a rule set and leaving a small amount of the card unpartitioned to ease cloning of installations later or help older/small cards with wear-leveling)

[tkaiser]

Is my SD broken ?

 

Maybe? Counterfeit cards exist (telling the OS and formatting tools they would have a size of 64 GB while having only 8 GB physical NAND flash) and that's the reason every flash media should be tested (not formatted -- this is 100 percent useless) prior to useage. Tools are available: http://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Getting-Started/#how-to-prepare-sd-card

[Technicavolous]

Well, not entirely useless ... remember not everyone is at the depth of understanding that you have, and for many, Windows is their host OS.

 

Testing is great, but formatting with SDFormatter for a Windows user makes the SD 'useful' again after having its partition table rewritten. Linux people are used to deleting partitions and resetting filesystems, Windows users know 'format,' especially kids.

 

Once an Armbian image has been written to SD by Rufus and booted by the SBC, if put back into a Windows machine it appears to be 32 MB. A regular Windows 'Format' will not recover this. Using a tool such as SDFormatter will reset the media to report its native size to Windows and allow the SD card to be used for something else.

 

 

Since we're talking here about Armbian: We know what we do, we deal with partitioning on a regular basis to improve things

 

Yes you do, but perhaps consider that others may not, or may be on the path to learning. I have read dozens of your posts and clearly you have a great deal of understanding of what is going on in the hardware and the software.  You are obviously a great resource to this community.

 

Please understand that some of us may not be purists and do indeed do other things  in computing or perhaps use Windows as a host OS. Also Please try to understand that many of us are on a path to a specific end, or learning for the sake of doing so. Either way, it can be difficult to open up to learning when one is blasted in bold by one of the senior members of the site.

 

I personally have spent hundreds of hours playing with Armbian on my ODroid XU4. I'm struggling to learn command line linux. I use windows, and have found it necessary to use SDFormatter in order to clense an SD of one image and write another. Rufus does pretty well, but always misidentifies the size of the card relative to the SD Association ap. Win32DiskImager wants the SD formatted. And again it is absolutely necessary if the SD is to be used for any other purpose once used for an image.

 

Just had to spar my $.02, because I find SDFormatter a valualble tool on my desktop as a Windows user.

 

Thanks though for reminding me about the getting started guide. F3 is an awesome tool and I have used it to find an actual faulty SD. maybe it was counterfiet, maybe faulty. But SDFormatter failed to format it and F3 revealed that the size didn't match the spec.

 

BTW, NOOBS is how I found Armbian ...

 

[tkaiser]

SDFormatter failed to format it and F3 revealed that the size didn't match the spec.

 

Thx for pointing this out (then SD Formatter is in fact useful if it can be used as a quick check for counterfeit cards since it seems to check partition boundaries). And also thanks for getting some insights into the Windows world (I'm not dealing with at all -- on customer's servers running Win 2008 or 2012 I got cygwin installed and only have to SSH into )

 

So while SD Formatter might be useful to reclaim partitioned space when the card has to be used with Windows or other devices that can only deal with FAT/eXFAT again it's still just a waste of time to use it before burning an Armbian image (since as explained before: the image burning process will overwrite the partition table anyway so all partitioning in a step before will vanish instantly).

 

There are many guides explaining quite the opposite (eg. from LeMaker, SinoVoip, Xunlong -- copy&paste from RPi or from each other) but it's still wrong and if it's about SBC useage SD Formatter might only be useful for a quick check for counterfeit cards (again: thx for pointing that out).

 

Regarding this topic I just found the relevant article again: http://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=681

 

(and sorry if my post seemed somewhat rude)