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I have 2 SD cards. Both flashed with Raspberry Pi OS. However, I started to have issues wiping the partition table on both the SD card after failed to flash a brand new Raspberry Pi to the SD.

One of the SD cards is a Raspberry Pi's 128 GB microSD card accompanied when I buy the main Raspberry Pi. Another one is AGI micro SD card for gaming (A2 128 GB).

I think the SD is somehow unresponsive to the write function because when I boot any of the SD cards to Raspberry Pi 5, the green light remained solid while the fan went on full speed, which should only happen when the kernel is booting. If I connect the display port, I will see a completely blank screen and hear some fan noises (since it is in full speed). But, as the SD card write failed on my personal laptop for both add file and change partition table, I cannot reformat the disk, nor can raspberry pi write the boot log file to /var/log/boot.log.

So, I have concluded a few questions that will help me solve the problem and help other people in this community solve simular problems.

  1. Is there some kind of protection in SD cards that you can set that prevents any write changes? What is the issue that is actively preventing the write function to both the partition table and the file system content itself?
  2. Is this issue linked or associated with Raspberry Pi Imager?
  3. How can I forcefully format the SD card in linux, so all data gets wiped no matter what? (How to solve this issue)

    Note: I have tried to use different tools like Gparted and Gnome Disk to try wipe the SD, but it all failed. I am sure this is not my computers problem because Raspberry Pi failed to boot as well. (correct me if I am wrong)

  4. What can I do to prevent this issue from happening again?

Update: Both of my SD cards does not have a mechanical switch, and the initial flash from Raspberry Pi imager succeeded.

Video of Disk Wipe in Gnome Disk

And this pops up:
Error formatting disk: Error synchronising after initial wipe: Timed out waiting for object (udisk-error-quark, 0)

Solution to the problem: The solution that I applied to my SD card is to change the firmware of Raspberry Pi and make it boot to USB before attempting SD card booting. That way, since USB generally wear slower than an SD card, USB can be used to boot the Raspberry Pi after writing the OS image to an USB.

See: https://linuxconfig.org/boot-your-raspberry-pi-from-a-usb-a-tutorial for steps

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  • So your cards are not mechanically locked, which means software "soft-locked" them or they are simply defective. Were these new cards? Are they name brand? Not that it matters did you purchase them from a known distributor with a good return policy and not known to sell fake products (on purpose). Commented 2 days ago
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    That does not tell me about the age of the card or if they are legitimate real products, although I would assume the supplier of the Pi did not provide a fake product. Never heard of AGI brand. Commented 2 days ago
  • Sorry for the misleading information. I bought the raspberry pi along with the SD card and readers about half a year ago. Plus the raspberry pi original card should be writable Commented 2 days ago
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    Have you written to these cards or have they been used for those 6 months under heavy use? We need more information. Update your question. Commented 2 days ago
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    @Max please stop writing comments ... update your question and delete the comments Commented 2 days ago

2 Answers 2

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Data point - I have a Raspberry Pi 4 doing backups. After about 3 years of medium use, the SD card goes read-only because its worn out.

I suspect your cards have had a lot of writes committed in the ~6 months of use, which has "used them up". Replacement is in order, and consider something that is not the cheapest out there.

Micro SD cards definitely have a lifetime, which increases with price and quality. I now run an "industrial" 16GB card, which cost as much as a 128G normal card.

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    ...because a industrial 16GB card is a 128GB card with 16GB used, so it can do heavy wear leveling probably. Commented yesterday
  • In my experience, "industrial" SD cards in the modern era are kind of a scam. They are for companies that are convinced the more expensive version is always better. Once upon a time they were a lot more reliable, but my impression is that convergence has taken place since then. (This is from experience in a work environment having them fail.) Commented yesterday
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Reasons:

  1. The Raspberry Pi 5 bootloader or OS image creates a GPT or MBR layout that some computers cannot modify.
  2. The partition table may become broken if the OS flashing process failed.
  3. Windows and some other systems cannot delete Raspberry Pi’s small boot partitions.
  4. The SD card adapter may be write-protected or faulty.

How to fix:

  1. Use Raspberry Pi Imager and select the Erase option to rewrite the whole card.
  2. Use diskpart on Windows or fdisk on Linux to clean the disk.
  3. Try using a different SD card reader.Read more
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