SD Card used with Raspberry Pi Balena Sound Locked on Read/Possibly Corrupted?

Hello! First time posting, but a few months ago I came across a guide to use Balena Sound and a Raspberry Pi 4 to create an Airplay Compatible Speaker. I got everything to work and everything was fine for a few months but something that has happened to me twice now is that the SD card I’m using in the Pi seems to be getting corrupted. When I log into the Balena Sound dashboard, it says the speaker is offline even though the Pi is powered on and connected. When I take the SD card and plug it into my computer, I get pop ups saying there are now 3-4 extra drive letter partitions on the card that I need to format in addition to the original partition that had the Balena sound software. I did not create these extra drives, and I’m unable to format or delete them since the SD card tells me it is “read only.” I am unable to format or erase the SD card using Windows disk manager or disk partition in command prompt.

This exact issue happened to me a few months ago with a previous SD used for this purpose. At the time, I thought maybe the card had just gone bad so I discarded it and got a new one. The new one worked for a while until it again had the same issue so I’m wondering if it is an issue with the software or my SD cards are just going bad. In both cases, the SD cards I am using are PNY brand 16gb cards.

Any insight on what might be going on here would be greatly appreciated!

Hi there, it is quite likely that the SD card is getting corrupted. We typically recommend high quality SD cards generally. There is a thread in the forums talking about this. SanDisk Ultra/Extreme and Samsung EVO type cards seem to perform reasonably well.

Hello! I had searched but had not come across that thread. I’m going to try one of the San Disk Extreme Pro or San Disk Endurance cards and see if I have different results. I have had 2 16gb PNY cards get corrupted now. Last night I checked, and each failed after about 3 months in use so I’m feeling even more so that it’s the card getting corrupted. I appreciate pointing me to the thread with those recommendations.

No worries!