I just wanted to sanity check what I seem to be seeing before I force a non-profit to spend $300 they don’t have.
I built a Raspberry Pi 5 and touchscreen based kiosk exhibit for small a local museum—it’s just a locally run website running on Chrome in kiosk mode following the official guide for running an RPi in kiosk mode (which notably includes running the SD card in read-only mode). It ran perfectly well for about a year, but one morning they came in and found it dead. I checked all the basics and it seemed like the SD card was kaput. I was a little surprised, but hey, stuff happens, and it doesn’t need an especially big card so we decided to just buy a new card and set everything up again.
So I got the SD card set up with everything installed at home, took it to the museum, put the card in and started everything up. It all seemed to work well, I just needed to make a couple adjustments so I shut it down and left planning to finish up that evening. When I came back, the RPi wouldn’t boot. After more investigation, I found the card once again unreadable in a wide variety of computers and devices.
I was worried that perhaps I had damaged the card somehow (I’ve bent those little guys trying to get them out of devices before) but in retrospect it seems like if that was the problem it wouldn’t have booted in the first place. So I went out and personally bought a third card just in case it was my fault. Same process, but this time it never booted to the SD card and now the 64GB card itself only shows as having a capacity of 128MB and will not reformat no matter what I do, leading me to think it’s effectively dead.
On the third try I was also trying out some of the pre-built images for kiosks, so there’s perhaps some small chance I did something there that messed up this third card, but I’ve also tried roughly 1000 different approaches (Windows, Mac, and Camera) to reformatting this SD card with no luck (happy to list out what I tried, but this is already overlong and suffice to saying if it appears on the first page of a Google search, I’ve tried it).
Has anyone seen anything like this? Would you replace the RPi at this point? I also considered trying to run the whole thing off a USB flash drive, but that doesn’t seem like a great long-term solution. Any advice appreciated.
