Pis are great. But when the power drops.the filesystem on the SDcard is corrupt. Then the Pi is dead with no hope of doing anything unless you brought a spare SDcard or something to mount/fsck/correct it with.
If I was going into space I'd take a Droid or an iPhone. That way I can play Angry Birds In Space in space.
The RPi will corrupt SD cards even mounted read-only. It has no hardware write protection and does mysteriously stupid things on power loss. The behavior is well known, which is why you keep hearing it.
With as cheap as you can get memory these days why doesn't someone put 16 or 32 GB on the same board and a way to TFTP boot and stop making me deal with SD cards.
I have never, ever seen this happen. I run mounted read-write, read-only, multiple partitions.
I run RPis off batteries, UPSes and dirty apartment building power with cheap Chinese power adapters. I've seen every combination of power loss during reads, writes, to primary or temporary fs.
Never ever seen corruption. I smell PEBKAC, as in your choice of sd card.
I'm not the op, but I smell arrogant assumption in your reply that your sample of 1 hasn't encountered the same issue. I work for a company and we actually trialled the Pi in a embedded application, we built out a lab with a common rail psu and climate control with four of them. 3 bricked themselves regular with sd card issues, and the fourth on the same psu sat there without issues for months being soak tested under load. We tried the cards that went bad in the "bad" units in the good unit, and again, it ne
So much this. Cheap SD cards are an absolute blight. Unreliable, slow, noncompliant, and failure prone.
Since most users are clueless, the only product differentiation available is price. We all know what happens to product quality when the race-to-the-bottom comes in to play.
And more often consumers, in their infinite wisdom, blame their devices when their 5 dollar grey market (and likely counterfeit) ebay sourced memory card causes problems.
This is the real reason, FYI, that SD card slots are disappearing
I've pulled the plug on my pi a couple of times, no problems. Last week I had it plugged into a battery, taking a picture every minute for a time lapse project until the battery ran out. Turned out fine. Maybe you've just had crappy SD cards, or bad luck.
Pis are great. But when the power drops.the filesystem on the SDcard is corrupt.
That's probably more a function of your crappy SDCard. These things are cheap, and probably not engineered to handle partial writes that would corrupt the card.
I do wonder why though, is it so difficult to order writes so that what's committed to FLASH is always recoverable?
Manufacturers are already struggling with other requirements, such as maximum possible density, and a reasonable number of erase/write cycles. Safe write ordering interferes with the other requirements, and is not something the average consumer notices.
This has nothing to do with a RPi. It is a common file system problem. RPi has 2 file systems. 1. Fat32 for the bootloader, proprietary firmware and kernel
2. Linux rootfs that can use many different kinds of file systems.
ext2 wasn't very good at handling unclean shutdowns. ext3/4 are a little better. fat32 is terrible.
Fortunately the fat32 partition doesn't need to be written very often, so you're good. Reads aren't dangerous.
No, I'm afraid not. (And these are name-brand Class-10 cards).
When the corruption hits the Pi won't boot at all. No grub no kernel no initrd no monitor sync. A fresh card fixes things. Restoring the image to the old card fixes it too.
We have near 100 of these in the field and while I've bench-powerfailed them to no avail, out in the real world they die due to fs corruption.
We have near 100 of these in the field and while I've bench-powerfailed them to no avail, out in the real world they die due to fs corruption.
Hang on, let's get that straight : if you pull the power when they're on the bench, then they don't fail, but if they suffer a power fail in the field they do suffer corruption and freeze/ hang/ fail to boot?
Obviously you've tried this, but are you sure that you're pulling the power on the bench while they're in mid-write? Because if you're doing ostensibly the same
I've had a couple Pi's also exhibit FS corruption on power loss as well. Not everytime, but each time you pull the power plug it's a roll of the dice. I was using them running RaspBMC OS and XBMC on top of them for media servers and I've seen them corrupt several times. Each time, there was no booting afterwards, would fail on boot and require a reflash of the SD card in order to get them back up and running.
I use my raspberri pi daily for the mission-critical task of downloading youtube videos and watching them on my HDTV (raspbian / omxplayer, ext3). haven't ever bothered properly shutting it down, except for maybe a handful of times. Five months later, the system still boots fine from the SD card and there has been no noticeable data loss on the videos.
Granted, the videos are stored on a USB jump drive, so the changes to the SD card file system are negligible.
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
-- P. Erdos
Hope he doesn't lose power (Score:3)
Pis are great.
But when the power drops.the filesystem on the SDcard is corrupt.
Then the Pi is dead with no hope of doing anything unless you brought a spare SDcard or something to mount/fsck/correct it with.
If I was going into space I'd take a Droid or an iPhone. That way I can play
Angry Birds In Space in space.
E
Re: Hope he doesn't lose power (Score:0)
I keep hearing this but I always just pulled the plug, no problems.
Re: (Score:0)
Did you pull the plug so that the SD card could go out with dignity?
Re: Hope he doesn't lose power (Score:0)
Never lost it. It is still running a modified Bodhi float, no issues.
Re: (Score:0)
Have you bothered to ask the SD card if it was OK with such extreme life-prolonging treatment? Or it's you who cannot let it go?
Re: (Score:2)
Then you're lucky.
The RPi will corrupt SD cards even mounted read-only. It has no hardware write protection and does mysteriously stupid things on power loss. The behavior is well known, which is why you keep hearing it.
Re: (Score:3)
With as cheap as you can get memory these days why doesn't someone put 16 or 32 GB on the same board and a way to TFTP boot and stop making me deal with SD cards.
Re: Hope he doesn't lose power (Score:5, Interesting)
I have never, ever seen this happen. I run mounted read-write, read-only, multiple partitions.
I run RPis off batteries, UPSes and dirty apartment building power with cheap Chinese power adapters. I've seen every combination of power loss during reads, writes, to primary or temporary fs.
Never ever seen corruption. I smell PEBKAC, as in your choice of sd card.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm not the op, but I smell arrogant assumption in your reply that your sample of 1 hasn't encountered the same issue.
I work for a company and we actually trialled the Pi in a embedded application, we built out a lab with a common rail psu and climate control with four of them. 3 bricked themselves regular with sd card issues, and the fourth on the same psu sat there without issues for months being soak tested under load. We tried the cards that went bad in the "bad" units in the good unit, and again, it ne
Re: (Score:0)
nope,
This has happened to me twice both times after power failures.
Re: (Score:0)
So much this. Cheap SD cards are an absolute blight. Unreliable, slow, noncompliant, and failure prone.
Since most users are clueless, the only product differentiation available is price. We all know what happens to product quality when the race-to-the-bottom comes in to play.
And more often consumers, in their infinite wisdom, blame their devices when their 5 dollar grey market (and likely counterfeit) ebay sourced memory card causes problems.
This is the real reason, FYI, that SD card slots are disappearing
Hope he doesn't lose power (Score:0)
I've pulled the plug on my pi a couple of times, no problems. Last week I had it plugged into a battery, taking a picture every minute for a time lapse project until the battery ran out. Turned out fine. Maybe you've just had crappy SD cards, or bad luck.
Re: (Score:2)
Pis are great.
But when the power drops.the filesystem on the SDcard is corrupt.
That's probably more a function of your crappy SDCard. These things are cheap, and probably not engineered to handle partial writes that would corrupt the card.
I do wonder why though, is it so difficult to order writes so that what's committed to FLASH is always recoverable?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This has nothing to do with a RPi. It is a common file system problem.
RPi has 2 file systems.
1. Fat32 for the bootloader, proprietary firmware and kernel
2. Linux rootfs that can use many different kinds of file systems.
ext2 wasn't very good at handling unclean shutdowns.
ext3/4 are a little better.
fat32 is terrible.
Fortunately the fat32 partition doesn't need to be written very often, so you're good. Reads aren't dangerous.
What you really want to do is make sure yo
Re: (Score:2)
No, I'm afraid not. (And these are name-brand Class-10 cards).
When the corruption hits the Pi won't boot at all. No grub no kernel no initrd no monitor sync.
A fresh card fixes things. Restoring the image to the old card fixes it too.
We have near 100 of these in the field and while I've bench-powerfailed them to no avail,
out in the real world they die due to fs corruption.
E
Re: (Score:2)
Hang on, let's get that straight : if you pull the power when they're on the bench, then they don't fail, but if they suffer a power fail in the field they do suffer corruption and freeze/ hang/ fail to boot?
Obviously you've tried this, but are you sure that you're pulling the power on the bench while they're in mid-write? Because if you're doing ostensibly the same
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I'm sure there's a Burma Shave in there...
Re: (Score:0)
I use my raspberri pi daily for the mission-critical task of downloading youtube videos and watching them on my HDTV (raspbian / omxplayer, ext3). haven't ever bothered properly shutting it down, except for maybe a handful of times. Five months later, the system still boots fine from the SD card and there has been no noticeable data loss on the videos.
Granted, the videos are stored on a USB jump drive, so the changes to the SD card file system are negligible.