Fixing a Raspberry Pi SD card that won’t boot

I have had a system that would not respond countless times with a Raspberry Pi when I was trying to roll my own. I have had also a few times where I just unplugged a system by accident futzing with something adjacent to it. There have been times when I would reinstall from scratch again. Do as I don’t. It was terrible. Now looking around I notice there are a lot of guides that tell you to bend pins, or get another card but I think people need another alternative. One that is a lot less intrusive than going nuclear and bending shit with a fork tine, or dropping another buck on a “cheap” computing option. Fixing a Raspberry Pi SD card that won’t boot has been something I have had to do many times early on.

The problem with Secure Digital media is that it isn’t all that secure and your data isn’t all that nonvolatile either. If you are writing to the disk and you power it down there is going to be corruption. From video files that weren’t cut before the camera was turned off, to SD cards that suffer a brownout here and there, SD cards get corrupt. Just do yourself a favour and try to mount the card first on a PC or something before you go to drastic measures. Fixing a Raspberry Pi SD card that won’t boot isn’t really all that difficult all the time.

Chiggity Check yo self…

There are a lot of articles out there about this but not one really brings this up. My boot corruptions have most usually been solved by removing the SD card and moving it to a PC or Mac or Linux machine and running a simple disk repair on it. Chkdsk, fsck, or Disk Utility it doesn’t really matter becomes sometimes the boot partition just isn’t marked active it seems. At least for me running Volumio it usually takes only a simple FSCK to get things going again. Which is great when you took time to install drivers and set up extra software. Fixing a Raspberry Pi SD card that won’t boot is simple as you make it really. DO a backup though because sometimes things can’t be repaired.