Re: Just got a Pi1B. What can you actually do with it these days?

Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Theo <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:

My main reason to pick a Pico over a Zero is reliability: I can be
sure a Pico will boot up every time, but I find it a lottery whether a
Pi will successfully boot or whether it's corrupted its SD for some
reason or another and won't boot.  I thought PiOSs was supposed to
automatically fsck the disc and reboot with everything clean if a
problem was detected, but for whatever reason this doesn't work - I
have to keep pulling cards and fscking them before the Pi will boot
again.
>
Anyone have any insights into why this is?  These Pis are getting
power pulled from them rather than a proper shutdown, but in the case
where they're sensors or whatever it's just a fact of life they get
power interrupted without shutdown sometimes.
>
One of my Pis has OpenWRT which I thought would help the corruption
issue as it's designed for routers which don't modify their flash very
often, but even that's got to the state of not booting - I need to
investigate further.

 
I’ve just restored a Pi which had been gradually accumulating filesystem
damage (without any reboots/power cycles) over time. It’s not the first
time.  My interpretation is that commodity micro-SD cards are mostly
designed and tested on the assumption that the user will be storing a
lot of smartphone photos on them, not a live root filesystem, and
accordingly wear out disappointingly fast. But this is just guesswork.

While I'm sure that's sometimes the case, I don't think that's what's
happening here.  The SD card itself is fine - no read/write errors, no long
pauses - but the filesystem is broken.  Which is to be expected if it wasn't
properly unmounted, but for some reason the automatic fsck-and-reboot
mechanism in PiOS doesn't seem to work.  I end up having to pull the SD,
plug it into another machine, fsck it (both the FAT and the ext4), put it
back into the Pi and then it boots.

If I don't do that and I have video attached to the Pi (ie I have already
pulled the machine to connect to a monitor) the boot stalls somewhere but
without a clear log as to why.

I also have this with a USB SSD, so I don't think it's a hardware problem.
(although that one runs Ubuntu, maybe it's not so good at fsck-and-reboot?)

Theo