Can't boot act led always on

Question

i have two cards. Old 4gb and new 32gb. New card:

I successfully can boot from this old card:

And can't from this card:

Both card was written by etcher. What can be wrong here?

Answer 1

Sometimes cards have defects that prevent them from booting, while appearing fine in your os.

A common flaw in IO can be diagnosed by simply trying to image the new card: you might get an I/O error.

If not, compare the image of the sd card that won't boot, with the one that boots. It helps to keep the partitions the same size, in such case comparing the first 4Gb would be a good test that your writes were succesfully.

But looking at the images, I can see that your new card has a partition of 2Gb then 32Gb free space, which is not consistent with a 32Gb card (it should add to 32Gb, not 34Gb). So possibly it is a corrupted drive.

We have come across a number of fake drives, reporting a wrong size i.e. 256Gb card being only 8Gb, but reporting 256Gb to the OS.

You can easily diagnose it testing the images, I suggest using some low-level utils such as dd or cat /dev/mmcblk0 so you can easily replicate the tests on different SD cards.

Addendum: You might want to ensure it's on the "good cards" list

Answer 2

You could be dealing with a corrupt flashing of the image. firstly erase the SD card using the program provided from here and then attempt to flash the card again using etcher.

If this doesn't work it's likely that it is dead and you will need a new one :(

Hope this helps :)