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SD card says write protected in W10
Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2019 6:42 pm
by KC3MLA
Decided it was time to re-burn my SD card to 4.1 Card has been running 3.4.17 24x7 for about a year. Did power-off shut down from pi-star dash.
Both SD Card Formatter and W10 formatter refuse to format, each complaining that the card is write protected.
Initially tried SD in adapter (lock off) in SD slot in laptop. Also tried USB card reader with micro SD slot. Same results.
Booted pi-star back up, went in with SSH from dashboard, did rpi-rw, then created a file in / and one in /boot. No problems.
Google suggested a couple things to try, none of which helped.
Thoughts?
Re: SD card says write protected in W10
Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2019 7:43 pm
by KE0FHS
Time for a new microSD card, and keep the current one as a back up.
Re: SD card says write protected in W10
Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2019 8:01 pm
by KC3MLA
Etcher won't let me select it since it, too, thinks it's locked.
I already tried the diskpart procedure (one of the things my google search turned up) but that didn't help.
Something in the card must have really gotten smoked...
Re: SD card says write protected in W10
Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2019 9:18 pm
by G8SEZ
A quick check of the write protect switch on the SD adapter would be sensible, cycle it a couple of times, or try a different adapter.
Re: SD card says write protected in W10
Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2019 9:37 pm
by KC3MLA
G8SEZ wrote: ↑Mon Nov 04, 2019 9:18 pm
A quick check of the write protect switch on the SD adapter would be sensible, cycle it a couple of times, or try a different adapter.
Tried it in an adapter, and with a usb drive that accepts micro SD directly. Same result. New card is booting in the hotspot as we speak. Time will tell.
Re: SD card says write protected in W10
Posted: Wed Nov 06, 2019 7:31 pm
by N6WBL
Windows 10 is not great with SD cards unless you get into the command line. A better choice is using a Linux machine.
BTW, I found a neat utility for checking SD cards called F3 available from Linux repos. You can use f3probe to test a card (limited test). You can also combine f3write and f3read to do a much more detailed test of the drive though this is taking a tiny bit of life out of the drive also known as destructive as they have a finite number of writes before failure. A card I had trouble with in a Pi-Star application failed f3probe, and recently my front window RPI-Camera 32 GB micro SD card passed after being corrupted by a series of power outages which I put back in service. You could install and run this from your Pi-Star machine if you don't have a Linux machine.
Detailed write up of f3 use:
https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.i ... usage.html