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I'm experiencing a strange effect. When I write a Raspbian image to an SD card using dd, the SD card becomes unusable. The Pi won't boot up and gparted shows an unknown file system on my Linux machine. So my first thought was that my SD card isn't compatible. I tried two others with the same effect. Sadly none of them are in the compatability list.

I was about to give up when I tried the following: I formatted one of the cards to fat32 and extracted NOOBS to it. This worked fine and I used NOOBS to install Raspbian. After installing it booted up just fine. My conclusion would be that the SD card is compatible after all.

Although it's working now I'd like to have this mystery solved. Why doesn't it work after a simple dd?

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    Did you check the md5 sum on the image after you downloaded it ? Sounds like a corrupt image.
    – Lawrence
    Nov 23, 2013 at 14:39
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    Make sure you use dd to write to the SD card, not to the first partition on de SD card. So of=/dev/sda and not of=/dev/sda1. Could you post the actual command you used? The fact that your PC doesn't see any filesystem seems to indicate that it's not a compatibility issue.
    – Gerben
    Nov 23, 2013 at 14:51
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    @Gerben You are right. I used /dev/mmcblk0p1 instead of /dev/mmcblk0 as output. Didn't know those strange device names for SD cards and didn't think about it enough. Feeling stupid now ;-) Post it as an answer and I'll accept it.
    – André Stannek
    Nov 24, 2013 at 10:26
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    We've all been there. Best of luck.
    – Gerben
    Nov 24, 2013 at 12:27

1 Answer 1

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Make sure you use dd to write to the SD card, not to the first partition on de SD card. So of=/dev/sda and not of=/dev/sda1.

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  • I was doing it to the card itself and still have the issue. I've used dd for years, but this is the first time where it's had issues booting such as where the filesystem boots as readonly. It works fine if I install Raspbian directly though. Very strange.
    – Sawtaytoes
    Dec 6, 2022 at 9:51

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