[Milhouse]

I believe I am starting to experience what it seems to me as "corrupted SD" problems, it started when I updated with one of Rbej's latest releases.(absolutely no fault on Rbej's releases... just coincidence)
Boot and disk are on an NFS share, so I did a manual update (copied SYSTEM, kernel and firmware...) which went fine.
The only problem is that after the first shutdown there was no way to reboot openelec.
I just got a missing signal on the TV and no sign of life on the pi, only the red power led (no rainbow screen etc)

I tried to remove all the overclocking settings, revert to one of the official openelec releases, change power adapter, but still no luck.
After a poweroff the only way I had to get the pi to boot again was to remove the SD from the pi and re-run ./create_sdcard from a linux box.
But this lasted only for one boot, at thw next reboot I had the same problem.

I swapped the sd card with a new one (same config.tx with overclocking, same NFS boot settings) and so far I rebooted several times with no problem at all.


I am not really sure what my problem is, so I really hope some of you guys could help me out a little:
- is this how a "corrupted SD" problem shows up? or simply this is what happens when the SD card fails due to bad luck, manufacture problem age...etc.? (4 months old Sandisk 4Gb, nothing fancy but working fine as a storage device on laptop camera etc.)
- is there a way to uncorrupt the SD card?
- are "media check" and "iotimeout" something that prevent corrupting SD cards? could you give me a link on where to get mor einfo on these options?
- is there any setting that is more "SD corruption" prone? or is there any factor that i shoudl take into account (just trying to avoid buying 1 SD card every 4 months...)


Thank you very much

m

Yes, sounds like corrupted boot files - you don't get the rainbow screen, just a completely dead Pi. When you did your manual update, did you copy the files using a PC or just your Pi and SSH (or maybe SFTP)? Did the transfer to SD card seem unusually slow, or not?

The recovery method is to extract the firmware and kernel.img, then write those files to the root of the SD card using a PC and card reader. After that, your Pi should come back up, no need to restore or recreate the entire image.

I don't think the corruption is indicative of a failing SD card, it's just something that can happen with the current firmware and certain SD cards, particularly if you are overclocking your Pi. For some users it happens fairly regularly, for others once in a blue moon, and for the lucky, never at all.

The "media check" feature (enabled by adding iotimeout=5000 to the end of your kernel line in cmdline.txt) is an attempt to detect problems early in the boot sequence and avoid using an SD card that has not been initialised correctly - the likely reason why you ended up with corrupt files - by automatically rebooting the Pi until the SD card HAS initialised correctly.

So just go ahead, edit cmdline.txt in a text editor and append "iotimeout=5000" to the end of your kernel parameters. Under normal circumstances you'll not notice anything unusual in the boot sequence, but if/when your SD card is misbehaving you'll notice a delay of up to 30 seconds, an an automatic reboot. 30 seconds may sound like a long time, but it's shorter than the time it would take to recover your system... ;-)

If only you'd enabled media check before updating you could be letting me know whether it had actually worked as intended, or not... and you'd probably still have a working system!

Overclocking is likely to increase the chance of corruption, but permanent SD card damage is very unlikely.