My Raspberry won’t boot up
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I’ve been very happy with my magic mirror for a while now however the other day it simple stopped working. I noticed now that I cannot get the Raspberry Pi 3+ to successfully start up. I explored online for days and tried changing the Config txt file after recovery start up.
It boots up to this part then goes black with a blinking cursor in the top left hand corner. Please can someone help a novice who was proud I had got the magic mirror fully working.
Thanks Richard
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I had that problem. Turns out my off brand cards I was using were fake sized. It would eventually overwrite itself. Card said “32Gig” was 8 meg or some such.
Double check you got good cards. I’d start there. Hope you got some backup.
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My understanding is that that micro-SD card problem is particularly vexing for the the photographic community. I told my daughter, a part-time pro photog, that I was buying another couple of micro-SD card for my PI4 and she warned me about that. There are some real horror stories associated with that issue - think weddings.
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@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
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@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
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@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.
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@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.
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@sdetweil Thanks Sam
