> "So while additional writes to the volume will succeed, reading back the data will give the wrong contents," explains Allan. That's ... not a correct impleme

> "So while additional writes to the volume will succeed, reading back the data will give the wrong contents," explains Allan. That's ... not a correct implementation of a USB mass storage device. I'm not surprised it broke; I'm surprised it ever worked at all. Looking into this a bit more, the RPi bootloader emulates block-level access to a FAT filesystem, but throws away writes to anything other than the contents of a few emulated files. Filesystem implementations and OS page caches are not written to treat the physical block storage as authoritative and capable of modifying their writes out from under them. To a filesystem or the OS, that just looks like a failing drive.