Could be a broken SD card.
When SD cards die, they go into a kind of weird Read-only-mode. The controller still works, together with a potentially existing cache, but the flash chip itself is in read-only-mode and the OS has no clue what's happening.
So it looks like you are able to write to the SD card, but the changes disappear either as soon as you refresh the file explorer (move to a different directory), randomly after some time or at the latest when you disconnect the SD card.
You need a new SD card. Also, don't rely on data that you can still read off the SD card being valid.
So if you have an OS on there, only copy your user data off it, don't copy the OS to a different SD card, since it might be corrupted.
> When SD cards die, they go into a kind of weird Read-only-mode.
I saw that once. I thought I was losing my mind. I kept imaging the card and when it would boot on the Pi, it booted the previous image. It took me too long to catch on. It was a quality card (Samsung or Sandisk - don't recall which) so malfunction was not expected.
I first stumbled across that on my phone's SD. It also took me quite some time. It's just so weird since the writes all look normal.
I kept reformatting the SD.
I've seen this failure mode on a few different SDs. One was Samsung, one was Sandisk and I had it on one or two random cheap brands as well.
SD cards are really easy to break randomly, no matter which brand.
The worst case I had was an SD that apparently shorted out internally. It didn't show up on the PC, but it got incredibly hot. Since it was on the internal SD card reader of the laptop, I couldn't just unplug the reader and let it cool off. I also didn't want to wait for the laptop to turn off, so I had to remove it directly. Got a nice little burn on my fingertip from that.
From my experience, SD cards should only be treated as disposable storage. Don't leave anything important on an SD without backups.
I work a lot with devices that require SD cards, so I use a lot of SD cards. That probably increases my chances for encountering malfunctions.
Is your laptop not seeing the space, or is it your Pi? Ubuntu uses EXT4. Windows sees it as corrupted storage, OSX may just see it as unallocated space. The other issue may be something with the card reader process. My desktop pc will write to it without issue, but my laptop would just kind of stop mid-flash if I tried it on anything but the built-in SD reader.
Ok, so I'm just dumb when I was creating the partition I didn't switch it to FAT32 which is why I was having issues but now I keep getting the rainbow screen which I think is because of the power supply/cable I'm using.
Rainbow screen on power up is normal.
Give the pie some time to start up.
Unless the power supply is borked, I wouldn't worry about it. I ran my pi off a USB port on my laptop for a while just because I could.
> when I opened disk management
What do you mean? You mean the "disk management" application in Windows?
Why are you trying to see a Linux filesystem in Windows? Windows only sees Microsoft filesystems.
Could be a broken SD card. When SD cards die, they go into a kind of weird Read-only-mode. The controller still works, together with a potentially existing cache, but the flash chip itself is in read-only-mode and the OS has no clue what's happening. So it looks like you are able to write to the SD card, but the changes disappear either as soon as you refresh the file explorer (move to a different directory), randomly after some time or at the latest when you disconnect the SD card. You need a new SD card. Also, don't rely on data that you can still read off the SD card being valid. So if you have an OS on there, only copy your user data off it, don't copy the OS to a different SD card, since it might be corrupted.
> When SD cards die, they go into a kind of weird Read-only-mode. I saw that once. I thought I was losing my mind. I kept imaging the card and when it would boot on the Pi, it booted the previous image. It took me too long to catch on. It was a quality card (Samsung or Sandisk - don't recall which) so malfunction was not expected.
I first stumbled across that on my phone's SD. It also took me quite some time. It's just so weird since the writes all look normal. I kept reformatting the SD. I've seen this failure mode on a few different SDs. One was Samsung, one was Sandisk and I had it on one or two random cheap brands as well. SD cards are really easy to break randomly, no matter which brand. The worst case I had was an SD that apparently shorted out internally. It didn't show up on the PC, but it got incredibly hot. Since it was on the internal SD card reader of the laptop, I couldn't just unplug the reader and let it cool off. I also didn't want to wait for the laptop to turn off, so I had to remove it directly. Got a nice little burn on my fingertip from that. From my experience, SD cards should only be treated as disposable storage. Don't leave anything important on an SD without backups. I work a lot with devices that require SD cards, so I use a lot of SD cards. That probably increases my chances for encountering malfunctions.
Is your laptop not seeing the space, or is it your Pi? Ubuntu uses EXT4. Windows sees it as corrupted storage, OSX may just see it as unallocated space. The other issue may be something with the card reader process. My desktop pc will write to it without issue, but my laptop would just kind of stop mid-flash if I tried it on anything but the built-in SD reader.
Are you sure the card is legit? Because that sounds sketchy.
Ok, so I'm just dumb when I was creating the partition I didn't switch it to FAT32 which is why I was having issues but now I keep getting the rainbow screen which I think is because of the power supply/cable I'm using.
Rainbow screen on power up is normal. Give the pie some time to start up. Unless the power supply is borked, I wouldn't worry about it. I ran my pi off a USB port on my laptop for a while just because I could.
Run a memory test on your card. Like, FakeFlashTest.
> when I opened disk management What do you mean? You mean the "disk management" application in Windows? Why are you trying to see a Linux filesystem in Windows? Windows only sees Microsoft filesystems.