So I bought a $60 Raspberry Pi 3B+ startup kit from wish I know Im dumb and it had been working for a good bit but then after a week or so I had been trying to figure out what OS to use and what LCD I should buy anyways somehow the SD card slot got dented thus making it not able to be used with a SD card because one piece is broken and for some reason they put it on the bottom well I then had a Raspberry Pi I couldn't use due to the Fact I couldn't return it and because booting from USB is unheard of on the internet I have tried installing raspbian to a USB and using that (should work without having to add program_usb_boot_mode=1 to config.txt in boot because its a 3B+ right) then I tried with program_usb_boot_mode=1 no avail on my working raspi 3B+ and on my non-working Raspberry Pi 3B+ I thought Berryboot may help but they I don't think support USB boot though you guessed it did not work please help me Ive been at this researching for months now and I would just like a straight answer/solution
2 Answers
Yes, the 3b+ can boot from USB without modification, so if that didn't work, it's more likely that you made an error in writing the image to the USB. So make sure you have the latest correct Raspbian image, and write it with a tool like etcher to the USB flash device. Then boot from it. Here are the instructions.
If that doesn't work, update your question above with a lot more detail about what you tried. What exact command did you use? What exact result do you get? Also feel free to ask a separate question about the sd card slot. It's not possible to tell from the information in your question, but it's possible it can be repaired. It's also possible that whatever incident damaged the sd car slot damaged other parts of the board enough that it is simply broken and can't be made to work without extensive efforts.
I was having the same problem, I was trying to format the SDcard with serveral software and how I end up solving my problem was using GParted, so hope you solved your problem so far but I wanted to leave a solution that worked for me for those looking for an answer.
So I suggest using a computer with linux or if you have a windows computer you can use a VM with any linux distro and use GParted to format your SDcard to FAT32. This did the job for me and I hope this helps someone else.
