Pi 2 seems to be broken.

[NewtSoup]

Hi,

After a year or two of being in a cupboard I dragged my Pi 2 out and tried to update it. The update failed. So I thought, no matter. I formatted the SD card and used balena etcher to put on a new raspbian image but i get the same errors.

sudo apt update results in ~620 packages are upgradable
sudo apt upgrade does all the Get portion says
Fetched 736 Mb in 5min 13s
dpkg-deb: error: subprocess <decompress> returned error exit status 2
dkpg-deb (subprocess): cannot copy archive member from '/var/cache/apt/archives/bash_4.3-11+deb8u2_armhf.deb' to decompressor pipe: failed to write (Broken pipe)
dpkg-deb: error: `/var/cache/apt/archives/libcomerr2_1.43.3-1~bpo8+1_armhf.deb' is not a debian format archive

After this it just gets darker and repetitive. This is on a fresh replacement of the OS

Anyone take a guess at the likely culprit?

I'm guessing it's a hardware issue, probably the SD card itself gone dud?

Forgive me for not doing a proper copy paste of the errors, I had to type it by hand as the browser version that installs doesn't want to play ball on quite a few sites ( this version of safari is no longer supported ) and I can't install iceweasel because errors.

[andersdk]

To me it sounds like something went wrong when Balena etched your SD card with the new foundation Debian Buster image.
Try format the SD card using the uitility "SD formatter" free downloadable.
Then do a fresh Balena etching once more.

I must say however, when I recently did a fresh install on my Pi zero, I was UN-pleassantly surprised how many updates it had to download, even with the newest foundation Debian Buster download.

[NewtSoup]

Well, it was giving me the exact same errors before I did the reinstall.. so same result before and after. If I can locate a space 32gb card I will change cards and have a go at that. Oh I should say I was using Balena because my main PC runs Linux Mint and was a recommended alternative to SD Formatter ( Windows ). I don't actually have a windows PC in the house.

[HawaiianPi]

I'm guessing it's a hardware issue, probably the SD card itself gone dud?

That would be my guess as well. Try another card, or test your current one with a utility like F3.

[NewtSoup]

Stuffed the SD Card back up the the nose of my mint system. Unmounted the partitions told disks to check the filesystem on the partition called Root (30GB)

Error Checking filesystem on /dev/sdc8: Process reported exit code 12:
e2fsck 1.44.1 ( 24 Mar 2018)
e2fsck: aborted
(udisks-error-quark, 0 )

Trying a repair produces a similar message that says "Unable to set superblock flags on root"

There is a 31gb partition called Extended Partition, Partition 2, 31GB but this is neither mountable not checkable in any way. From the way it's laid out it looks like it contains Free Space, SETTINGS, boot and root.

[andersdk]

Running Linux you can try parted from a terminal or gparted from your desktop.
That would give you full access to wipe partitions and reformat your SD card.

You MUST do that before re-imaging the Debian Buster image.

If you keep getting error messages, your SD card is no more, RIP.

[rpdom]

Running Linux you can try parted from a terminal or gparted from your desktop.
That would give you full access to wipe partitions and reformat your SD card.

You MUST do that before re-imaging the Debian Buster image.

When you write Raspbian images to your SD card there is NO NEED to do anything to the card prior to writing. The image file overwrites everything on the card including any existing partitions and formatting.

If, however, you are putting NOOBS on the card (or PINN, except for the image version), you do need to reformat the card in FAT32 format first.

As to the problem, it does sound like the card has developed a fault.

The presence of a "SETTINGS" area is odd for an Image based install though. That sounds like a NOOBS partition.

Running Linux I usually use dd to write to my cards, but you need to be very careful that you get the correct output device.

[andersdk]

...
As to the problem, it does sound like the card has developed a fault.

The presence of a "SETTINGS" area is odd for an Image based install though. That sounds like a NOOBS partition.

...

Which is why he MUST partition and reformat the SD card, to nake sure it is working and any strange partitions are wiped.
In a "normal" situation the image writer would use up the whole drive as one partition to hold the image.
Once Debian is booted, all things are set up, and the drive released for usage by Pi and its user.

[dustnbone]

When you write an image to a storage device, it writes a new partition table to it. Nothing you do before you write the image applies at all, it's all getting overwritten, at least the portion of it referred to by the new partition table. No need to wipe/partition anything beforehand.

If writing a bootable image with dd or Etcher or whatever other utility won't yield a bootable card, you have a hardware problem. If the Pi will boot other cards and not this particular one, it's safe to assume that hardware problem is with that card itself.

[rpdom]

Which is why he MUST partition and reformat the SD card, to make sure it is working and any strange partitions are wiped.

Wrong. You must have missed this bit.

The image file overwrites everything on the card including any existing partitions and formatting.

[NewtSoup]

Well this is really weird.

I installed GParted

Deleted the three logical partitions - boot, root and settings.

Clicked "Apply"

Then watched the progress bar go through tasks 1 to 3 and smiled at the completed message.

Then GParted refreshed the SD card and lo - the freshly deleted partitions had returned! With data intact!

This makes me wonder if Balena put a new image on at all. Which makes sense as Geany and Monodevelop appeared to be "pre-installed" on what I thought was the fresh OS.

[trejan]

Then GParted refreshed the SD card and lo - the freshly deleted partitions had returned! With data intact!

Nothing wrong with balenaEtcher or GParted. Your SD card has failed. They go read only and silently discard writes if they detect internal corruption in an attempt to preserve your data. You need to get a new SD card. Some people say you can format them in a camera to make it writable again but I've never been able to and all reports have been anecdotal.

[andersdk]

Yup, that SD card has reached EOL.

You dont need more than a 16Gb card for a full raspian image.
Any data and user programs should be stored an another media, like a USB stick, to avoid write operations to the SD card.

SD cards have limited lifespan because of write operations, which you already have discovered now.

[jamesh]

I must say however, when I recently did a fresh install on my Pi zero, I was UN-pleassantly surprised how many updates it had to download, even with the newest foundation Debian Buster download.

We are currently waiting for some stuff to finish QA before releasing a new full downloadable image. Also the holiday period coming up will probably delay things a bit - we don't like releasing stuff just before people go on holiday! Most of the changes are actually updated upstream packages rather than anything we have done specifically.

I just did a full-upgrade on a new install, only took about ten minutes to update, but I do have a fast connection, and this was on a 4GB Pi4. Your mileage may vary.

[andersdk]

Thank you for your answer jamesh

[NewtSoup]

And here we have reached the end of the thread

Thank you all for your replies and for accompanying my down Diagnostic Alley.

Two things will happen now. I will wait for the new image to be released and I will buy a new SD card in due course.

For the time being the Pi goes back in the cupboard.

One day ... one day I will finally get into accessing the Pi's surprisingly powerful graphics capability - It's actually more powerful ( same ram, slower clock but 4 cores ) and better graphics ( in principle ) than the PC I had back in 2002.