Raspberry Pi Imager Bricked My SD Card

[Cykoth]

Hi. I'm brand new here. I'm sorry I don't have any images as this all happened in real time and I thought I could salvage my 64GB SD card. So I had this card left over from an old Galaxy phone I had. It was formatted in ex-FAT. I know RB-Pi needs FAT file allocation, but I saw this Raspberry Pi imager program on Recalbox and thought all this would just work. Things were writing along and I stepped away. I came back to my computer and had an error message that something went wrong, and that I may have a bad drive. Prior to this there was nothing wrong with the SD Card. It was addressable by Win 10, had data on it, and I even made a backup of that data prior to doing all this. I deleted the data existing on the drive and ran the Imager then BRICK. So then I downloaded Etcher. And really had to be careful not to accidentally install a bunch of crapware btw. But while Etcher saw the drive it also ran into an error when I just tried to flash directly with the RB Pi 4 image. So I'm concerned about just buying another card and it being bricked also.

Anyone have any thoughts or similar experiences? Thanks so much!

[Cykoth]

So I had another 8GB SD card I wanted to test. I just went straight to Etcher. This card already was formatted FAT32. Using the image file recalbox-rpi4.img.xz.

[acris]

Hello
replace your sdcard or adapter.
It's not software problem, but hardware problem

[Cykoth]

@acris So I don't really know how you know that......

But I did order a new 64GB SD Card from Amazon. I used the same adapter from my prior experience. I got it to work, but for others who were in my position and would like a step by step this is EXACTLY what I did:

1. Insert the SD Card into the adapter and then the adapter into the computer. I made sure Win 10 could recognize it and verified that the format was ex-FAT.

2. I then ran the SD Card Formatter application from https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/index.html
   version 5.0.1.

3. I then launched the 1.5 version of Raspberry Pi Imager and selected Erase (format card as FAT32).

4. I then selected Emulation and game OS and navigated to Recalbox 7.1.1. This time it worked!

So even if you have a SDXC card that is functional, things seem very "tweaky" when you try to set them up for formats they were not designed to support (obviously).

Hope this helps others!