2013-01-27, 20:34
Anyone suffering from corruption of the ext4 (secondary) partition when booting OpenELEC based Pis is probably falling victim to the following problem.
About once every 8-10 boots, the SD card will not initialise correctly.
There is no dmesg available when standard builds of OpenELEC boot initramfs, so I built a custom version with dmesg to see what errors are occurring when the SD card is not initialised correctly - see pastebin for details.
When these SD card errors occur, OpenELEC continues on to mount the ext4 /storage partition which more often than not results in its corruption.
I'm just wondering if Popcornmix can shed any light on these intermittent SD card errors. Admittedly I'm using a pretty crappy micro SD card which pre-dates the Class 2/4/6/10 system, but I'm also seeing the same problem with a more recent full-size Class 2 4GB Transcend. Most of the time the cards work, but each reboot is like Russian Roulette as you never know if the SD card is going to freak out. Even when booting over NFS these SD card errors are still a risk, as when the software auto-updates it tends to write corrupt kernel.img/start.elf/etc files to the FAT partition, leaving the system unbootable.
My solution right now is to try and detect when the SD card is misbehaving and reboot the Pi until it behaves itself (which is usually the next reboot, very occasionally it may take two reboots). Would this suggest its some sort of timing/race issue?
512MB (128MB GPU) Pi, Overclocked 1000/500/600/+4/+2, Transcend 2GB MicroSD (in full size SD adapter), 2A Palm Touchpad PSU.
About once every 8-10 boots, the SD card will not initialise correctly.
There is no dmesg available when standard builds of OpenELEC boot initramfs, so I built a custom version with dmesg to see what errors are occurring when the SD card is not initialised correctly - see pastebin for details.
When these SD card errors occur, OpenELEC continues on to mount the ext4 /storage partition which more often than not results in its corruption.
I'm just wondering if Popcornmix can shed any light on these intermittent SD card errors. Admittedly I'm using a pretty crappy micro SD card which pre-dates the Class 2/4/6/10 system, but I'm also seeing the same problem with a more recent full-size Class 2 4GB Transcend. Most of the time the cards work, but each reboot is like Russian Roulette as you never know if the SD card is going to freak out. Even when booting over NFS these SD card errors are still a risk, as when the software auto-updates it tends to write corrupt kernel.img/start.elf/etc files to the FAT partition, leaving the system unbootable.
My solution right now is to try and detect when the SD card is misbehaving and reboot the Pi until it behaves itself (which is usually the next reboot, very occasionally it may take two reboots). Would this suggest its some sort of timing/race issue?
512MB (128MB GPU) Pi, Overclocked 1000/500/600/+4/+2, Transcend 2GB MicroSD (in full size SD adapter), 2A Palm Touchpad PSU.
