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So, long story short - I created an image of my 16GB SD card used for my Raspberry Pi. I bought a 32GB SD card, wrote the image on it and it is now totally bricked.

The SD card is brand new, just picked it up today.

Boot sector is all jacked up, partitions are all over the place, I cannot format it with any tools .. nothing seems to be able to fix it up.

It seems the logical geometry is out of whack. Is there anything I can do to just start with a clean slate? I've used various tools to try to rebuild the boot sector/partition table .. and nothing is working.

Thanks

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  • Do you have access to linux?
    – Paul
    Aug 17, 2014 at 2:31
  • @Paul I do. I have a little linux media center sitting next to me I can ssh into if i need to
    – cowsay
    Aug 17, 2014 at 2:34
  • Have you tried using the 'official' sd card formatter?
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Aug 17, 2014 at 3:26
  • @JourneymanGeek yeah, it doesn't work. It says it's write-protected, but it's not. It doesn't have a lock switch, and I can freely modify files on the partition. The issues with my SD bug out that formatter
    – cowsay
    Aug 17, 2014 at 3:39
  • What exact steps did you follow to write the image to the SD card? Was the SD card working fine before? Did you you try to use the Delete option available in TestDisk? What happens if you right-click any of the partitions in the Disk Management utility and choose Delete Volume from the context menu?
    – and31415
    Aug 17, 2014 at 7:42

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I'd suggest a few things, in this order -

First, use the sd card association formatter as per the noobs installation guide - specifically make sure you have the "FORMAT SIZE ADJUSTMENT" setting to on.

If that dosen't work, boot into linux and use 'shred' on the base device of the sd card to wipe out the partition table and everything else on the drive. Create a new partition table with gparted or fdisk, and carry on as per normal.

I'd also recommend using noobs over a raw image if possible, if only to avoid this sort of thing happening.

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  • I have tried the SD Card formatter, it says it's write protected (it's not, it doesn't even have a lock switch). Whatever happened to my SD card is bugging out that program. Thanks for the tip on NOOBS.. looks interesting. I am using RetroPie though so that won't really work in this situation. I will try shred, thank you. I've tried wiping the partition tables on windows and rebuilding with third party tools but that hasn't worked. Will try on linux.
    – cowsay
    Aug 17, 2014 at 3:38

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