Briefly - tried flashing the 21.04 RPi 400 Desktop image to a 128GB microSD card with the stock Pi Imager on macOS last week. Installed ok, and worked for two reboots, upon which I saw a terminal message on startup telling me the microSD needed a manual fsck running. Did that, but no progress - subsequent restarts took me to the manual fsck message again.
OK, I thought - I’ll reflash the SD. However, nothing would complete a reflash (tried Balena Etcher & the Pi imager).
I was also unable to reformat the SD to any file system - tried on macOS Disk Utility, Windows disk management tool, and gparted.
I therefore assumed the SD, despite being less than a year old, was the problem, and ordered a 400GB replacement.
Tried the same process again today, with exactly the same results! I now have two SD cards with a system-boot and a writeable partition, with which I can do nothing.
I’d like to understand how this has happened, but most importantly how I can reformat the SDs so I can use them elsewhere? No tool appears to be able to write to the drive - partitions appear fixed and unalterable. Tried initialising, reflashing, formatting &c.
Errors vary across platforms, but are all to the effect that verification cannot be completed as the contents of the SD cards are different from what was written. I’ve established that the cards haven’t somehow become read-only.
I also used two other SDs in the same reader, with the same Pi 400, and successfully flashed alternative operating systems, and could then reformat the SDs without issue.
It seems as though the Ubuntu image is somehow hosing the cards - has anyone else experienced these issues? I have access to macOS, Windows 10 and several Linux VMs.
TIA,
Darren, UK
