Why can't Pi 4B read a copied back-up micro-sd card in a usb card reader?

I don't think the Pi model is a factor here.

When you made your backup, did you select New partition UUIDs?

If not, that's likely the problem. SD Card Copier help says this:

Under Raspbian Stretch and later versions, you cannot mount two partitions with the same UUID, so you will not be able to mount a cloned SD card when booted from the disk from which it was cloned. If you need to do this, check the "New Partition UUIDs" box before copying.

You can change the UUID with this command:

sudo tune2fs /dev/sdb2 -U random 

After that, unplug the microSD adapter, then reinsert it. It should auto-mount from now on. If not, try rebooting.

I regularly read SD Cards on my Pi4, so this is possible.
(The USB3 ports on the Pi4 have some limitations with USB2 devices, although I would not expect this to affect a SD Card reader, but have had occasional problems and usually use one of the USB2 ports.)

I have experienced only one problem which proved to be due to a faulty Card.

I need to manually mount the Card, and can post the script I use to do this.

#!/bin/bash # 2017-05-06 # 2018-11-18 BOOT_MOUNT='/mnt/SDA1' ROOT_MOUNT='/mnt/SDA2' # Check/create Mount Points if [ ! -e $BOOT_MOUNT ]; then mkdir $BOOT_MOUNT fi if [ ! -e $ROOT_MOUNT ]; then mkdir $ROOT_MOUNT fi echo "mounts " $BOOT_MOUNT $ROOT_MOUNT if [ -e /dev/sda ]; then SD1='/dev/sda1' SD2='/dev/sda2' else SD1='/dev/sdb1' SD2='/dev/sdb2' fi echo $SD # Mount Partitions if ! $(mountpoint -q $BOOT_MOUNT); then mount $SD1 $BOOT_MOUNT # mount partition containing boot files fi if ! $(mountpoint -q $ROOT_MOUNT); then mount $SD2 $ROOT_MOUNT # mount root partition containing OS files fi 

The following unmounts SD Cards

#!/bin/bash # 2017-05-06 # 2018-11-18 BOOT_MOUNT='/mnt/SDA1' ROOT_MOUNT='/mnt/SDA2' umount $SD1 $BOOT_MOUNT # mount partition containing boot files umount $SD2 $ROOT_MOUNT # mount root partition containing OS files 

The point raised by Botspot is valid.

You should give SD Card copies a unique PARTUUID which needs to be changed in several places. (SD Card Copier has an option to do this.)

The following script set-diskid will set PARTUUID on a booted system in all the correct places.

It can be invoked with sudo set-diskid -n

NOTE you need to reboot after running the script.

#!/bin/bash errexit() { echo "" echo "$1" echo "" exit 1 } usage() { errexit "Usage: $0 [-n | diskid]" } if [ $(id -u) -ne 0 ]; then errexit "$0 must be run as root user" fi PTUUID="$1" if [ "${PTUUID}" = "" ]; then usage fi if [ "${PTUUID}" = "-n" ]; then echo ${PTUUID} PTUUID=$(uuid | cut -c-8) fi PTUUID="$(tr [A-Z] [a-z] <<< "${PTUUID}")" if [[ ! "${PTUUID}" =~ ^[[:xdigit:]]{8}$ ]]; then errexit "Invalid DiskID: ${PTUUID}" fi echo "" echo -n "Set DiskID to ${PTUUID} on /dev/mmcblk0 (y/n)? " while read -r -n 1 -s answer; do if [[ "${answer}" = [yYnN] ]]; then echo "${answer}" if [[ "${answer}" = [yY] ]]; then break else errexit "Aborted" fi fi done echo "" fdisk /dev/mmcblk0 <<EOF > /dev/null p x i 0x${PTUUID} r p w EOF sync PARTUUID="$(sed -n 's|^.*PARTUUID=\(\S\+\)\s.*|\1|p' /boot/cmdline.txt)" if [ "${PARTUUID}" != "" ]; then sed -i "s|PARTUUID=\S\+\s|PARTUUID=${PTUUID}-02 |" /boot/cmdline.txt sed -i "s|${PARTUUID:0:(${#PARTUUID} - 1)}|${PTUUID}-0|" /etc/fstab fi sync 

NOTE PARTUUID and UUID are different entities.

UUID is a 128-bit number used to identify information in computer systems, in particular it is used to identify partitions on GPT & Linux filesystem.

MBR does not support partition UUIDs, but Linux supports PARTUUID for MBR partitions.
The format is SSSSSSSS-PP, where SSSSSSSS is a 32-bit MBR disk signature (stored in the MBR label-id field), and PP is a partition number.