Raspberry Pi Imager not writing to SD Card. Fails without errors. (Ubuntu)

Question

I'm using KDE Neon 5.19 which isn't too different from Ubuntu 18.04. Regardless, I have an old Raspberry Pi B (the one with just two USB ports and a full sized SD slot). I grabbed an SD card from a camera and tried to run the Pi imager on it to get my Pi running again. The imager completed without error.

Then I plugged it into my Pi, plugged that into an Android charger (Samsung) and into an old monitor that I've used with this Pi before. Nothing happens. It gets power, the light comes on, but the display says no signal. So then I check the card in the partition editor and it doesn't look like anything changed. The photos from my camera are still on the card.

What am I doing wrong? I choose the Raspian OS and the memory card is 32 GB.

Answer 1

I think a similar thing happened to me a while ago and the problem maybe the SD has decided it has written to its memory too many times. When it thinks this has happened it will not write data to the memory any more. With my card no errors were reported when a file was writen to the card but it was not writen. The card I had you could read but you could not write to it in truth. Test whether you can write to the card by writing a file to it. Then eject the card and reinsert it. Now check if the file is still there. Your solution therefore is to use a different SD card.

Answer 2

I just solved it! I'm not 100% certain if this is the only solution, but I tried the version of the imager from the KDE Discover store, I tried the version downloaded from the Raspberry Pi website, and both did the same thing. However, I then tried the Snap version snap install rpi-imager and it worked! It prompted me for admin access (something the other's didn't) and when I confirmed the writing process and verification were much slower. When it was done, I was able to boot my Pi with it!

So, I'm guessing the solution is to use the Snap version of the imager. I hope this helps others!