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I've just gone a roundabout way of flashing an SD card with IoT core as my Win10 machine has no SD card reader. Using the IoT dashboard I've downloaded the image onto a USB stick and cloned it onto SD using a linux laptop (using dd with error checking disabled dd if=usb of=sd conv=noerror,sync, otherwise it blows up a little past 8GB). However, the IoT image is resolutely read-only, I can make any changes I want, hostname (via PowerShell or the web interface), adding new files, changing the password (which then sticks for that session) but after I restart it's exactly back to stock minwinpc. Is there something in the imaging process that ties the image to the SD card? Seems like that would prevent you restoring a device from a borked SD or is that all part of the IoT dream? None of the settings provided from the Dashboard installer are reflected in the image either?

Edit:

Bad SD card - could not get it to perform any write operations, gparted, dd if=/dev/zero and fdisk would all happily report it was blitzed only for the partitions to still be there. Very odd. I would expect flashing the card this way would in fact work, coincidence proved its undoing in this case however.

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  • so ... you cloned a USB with a FAT filesystem with a file on it ... and that actually boots?
    – Jaromanda X
    Apr 10 '17 at 6:55
  • I clone the entire stick directly, the six IoT partitions show as the same on both SD and the source Usb.
    – tobyd
    Apr 10 '17 at 7:23
  • Try and create a file using powershell, reboot and see if the file is still there? Really strange way of flashing your SD card too. Sounds like something is really messed up and maybe a scan disk is restoring a snapshot thinking that the file system is constantly borked.
    – Piotr Kula
    Apr 10 '17 at 15:03
  • I did try this before posting, the file gets written and can be read back, just isn't there after a reboot. Its a shonky way of imaging the SD card granted but I hoped it would save installing Win10 on my laptop, I'd really like to know what its up and what happens during that dism install. I'll give noobs a shot.
    – tobyd
    Apr 10 '17 at 15:16
  • can you please answer your question and mark it answered. It may be valuable to other people in the future. Thanks.
    – Piotr Kula
    Apr 25 '17 at 12:12
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If you are having trouble with flashing your SD card I would suggest putting NOOBS onto it.

This really makes putting any OS really easy for you, just plug the Pi into LAN and let it download the image and flash (or connect to Wifi in NOOBS).

You can get more help about NOOBS from the MS help

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/Docs/GetStarted/noobs/GetStartedStep1.htm

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  • bad SD card all along, how gloomy.
    – tobyd
    Apr 10 '17 at 21:36
  • wow .. I hate it when that happens :( at least you worked it :)
    – Piotr Kula
    Apr 11 '17 at 7:50
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This was a bad SD card all along. It was acting exactly like it was writing data, same write speeds, reported it had DD written all data but whatever occured during the initial IoT imaging process had done bad things to the card and it was stuck in a read-only state. Imaged the new card from the documented way if installing via Win10.

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