piratebox_rpi_1.1.3-1-19-03-2017 bricking SD cards

I've flashed the image to 3 micro SD cards, all different brands and classes. Twice with Win32 Disk Imager and once with Etcher. Piratebox boots fine. I ssh into it and change the password then reboot. When it comes back on, I have to use the old password. I put them into my laptop, wrote a few folders to the card then ejected it. When I put it back in, none of the folders I created were in there.

I tried googling the problem but can't seem to find similar issues. There's no way 3 cards just failed like that all at the same time. I don't have another computer to try the cards in to see if it's just my laptop being weird.

Hi,
this sounds strange. An image is not able to "brick" an SDCard.

Some hints in general:
- If you use an mSDCard adapter to SDCard, make sure it is not set to write protection
- The ext4 filesystem is configured with default paramters, so no write restriction by the filesystem.
- On the piratebox OS side, we limit the writing on the SDCard to an intervall of 5 Minutes, shorter if more data is written. an unconditionally shutoff after setting the password will result in a not written change. If you performed a normal "reboot", that change should be stored because during that phase all open changes are commited to the SDCard.

Beside of this, please double check your setup on the computer and your pi.

Strange...
best regards
Matthias

I could have probably picked a better word. All 3 cards went into read-only mode after flashing the image to them. I borrowed a friends laptop to see if it was my machine's fault. Any changes I make to the cards (including deleting the partitions) aren't saved once I eject it. I'm going to try flashing piratebox again using my friends computer when I get my hands on another SD card. That'll probably be some time over the weekend.

I am not sure if you are using windows or linux. But on linux, you need to run "sync" after the flash is finished. In your case, I suggest to grab a cup of coffee after writing the sdcard is finished. The reason is to make use that the device is finished with writing all data and nothing is pending.

The default "excuse" is: We have an amount of over 100 downloads via bittorrent on our torrent-servers, so if there is an issue with the image- there should be much more bug reports.

strange..

Matthias

Turns out it was my laptop. I feel dumb now. I guess the SD card slot on it is crap. I flashed the image on another computer and it works fine. Sorry for the post.

No Problem, I am glad that you found out the reason!

Have fun, Matthias