SD card - Erased the MBR, reformatted FAT32 and copied NOOBS 3.0.0 files - won't boot

a boot sector?

--
Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the  
gospel of envy. 

Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. 

Winston Churchill

TNP,

"and copied the Noobs 3.0.0 files onto it"

Would I have been able to do that without it ?

Regards, Rudy Wieser

the Pi just looks in FAT for a file called bootcode.bin

what size card?

formatted with XP's own formatter (from explorer or cmd shell) or a 3rd party tool?

Andy,

about 15x10x1.5 mm :-)

Seriously, it just 16GB.

Neither. From within "computer management" (the partition manager).

But I think I found the cause: when I used HPs formatting tool (HPUSBFW) the SD worked again. The difference ? The former formatted the SD as being a mega-floppy (starting with a simple boot record), while the latter wrote an MBR with a single partition.

Regards, Rudy Wieser

On Sun, 20 Jan 2019 18:49:52 +0100, "R.Wieser" declaimed the following:

You might also have lost the SD card reserved security space... Unfortunately, I don't know if the SD card association formatter runs under WinXP (they only list back to Win7).

--
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN 
	wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

yup!

--
"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They  
always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them" 

Margaret Thatcher

Dennis,

And what might that be ? Something similar to what the the old spinners had (to "fix" bad sectors) ?

It installs, but does not run (mentions not finding a function in shell32). Yup, made that mistake myself. :-)

Regards, Rudy Wieser

TNP,

Nope.

Regards, Rudy Wieser

Andy,

Yep, that one was among the files I copied (I did some checking before posting here).

Regards, Rudy Wieser

On Sun, 20 Jan 2019 21:03:16 +0100, "R.Wieser" declaimed the following:

No... It was a small number of blocks intended to be used by security software running on the host computer (the S in Secure Digital). Likely meant to contain part of a decryption key which software could then use to access files on the regular part of the card.

Otherwise they are basically MultiMediaCard (MMC).

""" SD/SDHC/SDXC memory cards have a "Protected Area" on the card for the SD standard's security function. Neither standard formatters nor the SD Association formatter will erase it. The SD Association suggests that devices or software which use the SD security function may format it. """ (Doesn't explain if using block erase operations on the device can hit that area)

--
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN 
	wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

Dennis,

It also crossed my mind ...

... but discarded it of exactly that.

Thanks for the explanation.

Regards, Rudy Wieser

Formating the sdcard with XP-whatever, will not put the MBR in a working state. if no correct MBR, it will never boot

K.

which is the opposite of what the O/P reports ...

Kelbel,

Thats funny, I seem to remember that I stated that it did. Are you claiming I just made that up ? If not, what *do* you mean.

Also, the standard XP formatting will not put an MBR onto the media to begin with, working or not (but - obviously - it can be different for the "whatever" kind :-) )

Define "correct" And than please explain *why* "it will never boot" without an MBR.

You see, (USB) (thumb)drives (and yesteryears floppies) have no problem with being bootable without one.

In short, you've made a number of claims without explaining them. And as you might have noticed by now, that doesn't quite work for me (understatement).

Regards, Rudy Wieser

P.s. Suggestion: Re-read my reply to Andy again (in this branch the second, or from here the third of mine up), but now a bit more carefully. It

*should* explain a thing or two. If you than still have questions to what I did than feel free to ask.

Andy,

I think (hope actually) he misunderstood. Than again, his post is rather vague (an understatement), so I could be wrong in that ....

Regards, Rudy Wieser