SD name changes to Boot

I have brand new Samsung 32GB SD cards for use in an Orange Pi project. I formatted them with SD formatter without issue. I then use Etcher to burn .IMG files to the SD card. At some point during the burn the name is changed from “Master” to “Boot”. And it says 1 failed. I cannot see it in file explorer. If I remove it and re-insert it is findable in file explorer and it contains the image files, but the name is still boot. I’m not at all sure if this will work. Can anyone tell me why this is happening? Thank you, Larry B.

Hi @Radarlarry, welcome to the forums : )

So the name change happens as etcher prepares the SD card to be bootable by the Pi hardware. There are multiple partitions created in the same SD card and each partition is given a standard name. Thus the rename is expected.

Then the error is not expected. What’s the specific error you see? Could you still make SD card work after the error?

If you’d like us to investigate the error, we need more info. Do you see any meaningful error information in the DevTools? (Ctrl+Alt+I or Cmd+Alt+I if you’re on Mac OS) It’d be great if you could copy paste the error message and also put a screenshot of etcher.

I do not have the Pi hardware in hand, but should this week. Ok, I understand the name change to Boot, altough no one else in the project has experienced this and all are using etcher. We are all flashing the same IMG files, downloaded from it same host.

The error I am noticing comes when flash and validation are finshed. Screen says something like “1 bad” on about 3/4 of the SD cards. Some seem fine.

I don’t know if the cards will function normally until I receive the Pis.

Thank you, Larry B.

Hi @Radarlarry,

Etcher should be changing the name on all the flashed cards, so this seems a bit strange. When Etcher writes the device provisioning image to the boot media, it essentially removes all prior formatting/naming as part of the write, as Firat mentioned. I’m not entirely sure why it wouldn’t be doing this for other cards, though.

Could you provide us with a bit more information on the card verification failure? You should be able to Toggle Developer Tools from the ‘View’ menu for Etcher, and then selecting the Console window should show any errors encountered. To get the output from this would be very useful (unfortunately I don’t know what '1 bad` means).

Finally, we recommend highly specced SD cards, such as the SanDisk Extreme Pro series, which are a lot harder wearing than most other cards.

Best regards, Heds

Hello, Heds
I apologize. The error is “1 Failed”. It occurs during the unmounting process. At that point Etcher either says “1 Successful” or “1 Failed”. No other errors are noted anywhere. I reformatted my SD cards and tried Etcher again. Eventually they all passed validation, but several required 2 or 3 attempts.

Hi @Radarlarry,

Thanks for the update and the screenshot! It would be really useful if you could enable the Developer Tools for Etcher before flashing an SD card, and capturing the console log output from it after it’s failed. This should hopefully allow us to track down what’s going on.

My fear is that the SD card is problematic and that, even though it flashes correctly eventually, might cause corruption issues in a device later on (we’ve found issues with many SD cards, which is why we recommend SanDisk Extreme or Ultra cards, as we’ve carried out extensive testing with these).

Another option, depending on your application, is a balenaFin, which is a dedicated carrier board for the RaspberryPi CM3(+) modules, with onboard eMMC (you can see more about them here).

Best regards.