My Raspberry won’t boot up

[richardh151]

@earnestrichards Thanks for your feedback but it’s a Kingston SD card and I can see the contents on the Card when I Plug it into my PC. I think the SD card is not the Problem, but I’m no expert

[sdetweil]

@richardh151 sadly these SD cards are a lot more fragile than they would have you believe. the actual memory cells are write once. so as u write more times, u leave behind old dead, used memory cells, until you run out, and then the card is useless.
I have gone thru 8 memory cards.

on.my two mostly development machines, I have moved to boot from SD card, run from SSD.
it has the same memory issue, but due to the size, will take a lot longer to run out.
(recent reports of a windows 10 defragmentation bug causing early SSD failures from this problem. see https://www.pcgamer.com/amp/windows-10-bug-wrecking-ssd/ )

so, my best suggestion, get a new card, and an adapter, flash raspian on the new card, and then use the adapter in a USB port on the pi to copy the MagicMirror folder to the new card.

and get a bigger card than u need

[earnestrichards]

@sdetweil That’s interesting, and disconcerting, about the Win10 SSD problem.

How long do you estimate that your cards last?

Does reading the card inflict damage the same way as a write would?

I think I will also keep at least one cloned SD card handy.

[sdetweil]

@earnestrichards read does not affect like write does. and of course for low write environments, like cameras and music devices, the cards last near forever.

my 8 cards have failed since Nov 16 when I started working on pis. lost a pi 3 mm card 2 weeks ago. luckily it wasn’t customized.

[richardh151]

@sdetweil Thanks Sam