SD Card Mystery

[gsh]

Hi,

Sorry I hadn't replied after being poked by Andrew earlier... Yes we did fix a bug rather recently that Andrew found certain SD cards failing to boot (left with the green LED slightly glowing)

The bug was fixed and a new version of the firmware pushed (the important thing is the bootcode.bin file you should be able to copy on a new version of this with no ill effects

Otherwise, I've got another Pi on my desk exhibiting similar effects which I'm going to look at tomorrow morning, will get back to you when I know whether yours is a new issue

Thanks

Gordon

[hidekiai]

Hi,

Sorry I hadn't replied after being poked by Andrew earlier... Yes we did fix a bug rather recently that Andrew found certain SD cards failing to boot (left with the green LED slightly glowing)

The bug was fixed and a new version of the firmware pushed (the important thing is the bootcode.bin file you should be able to copy on a new version of this with no ill effects

Firstly, thank you for responding (and thanks to Andrew for notifying you). Thank you for this tip. It'll expedite on testing in the future when new firmware are available by doing what you have instructed.

Otherwise, I've got another Pi on my desk exhibiting similar effects which I'm going to look at tomorrow morning, will get back to you when I know whether yours is a new issue

Thanks
Gordon

We can ship you the finicky Pi and a card (that works on some and not on others) if you are interested and cannot locate Pi's like the one I've mentioned - please note that the Pi's that has the label "1325" on the backside of the motherboard seems to have more issues being finicky (though I think it could be a red-herring).

Once again, thank you in advance for looking into this issue for us.

[Montschok]

I've had issues with the card working for a while and then after a few reboots it doesn't work.

I tested it by adding "shutdown -r now" to the startup scripts (in rc.local iirc). The best result I got was almost an hour of working reboots before it failed again.

Some of the things I've tried/checked (none of which helped) :

* Added the ro flag to all partitions in /etc/fstab. This should make the partitions mount as read-only, but I don't know if the firmware writes some stuff to the card anyway.

* Backfeeding the USB-port with a powered USB hub. (This seemed to make it take longer until it failed, could have been random though.)

* Running badblocks on the sdcard from a computer.

* Another SD card.

* Adding a delay of a few minutes before the reboot.

This was with Debian in case it matters.


My conclusion is that there is something wrong with the Raspberry Pi (hardware and/or firmware), but for some reason almost everyone seems to blame it on the SD cards, even if they work flawlessly elsewhere.

I haven't tried the firmware update mentioned in this thread, but since it's already been reported that it doesn't always help I'll probably not even bother testing it tbh.

[hidekiai]

...snip...
My conclusion is that there is something wrong with the Raspberry Pi (hardware and/or firmware), but for some reason almost everyone seems to blame it on the SD cards, even if they work flawlessly elsewhere.
...snip...

Thanks for the response and sharing your tests. I do want to agree with you that it is perhaps the hardware, but I ended up leaning towards the SD card side because sometimes, when I did "fsck" on the SD cards that were not too reliable, it would report first partition (vfat/msdos) to have dirty-bit set, etc, yet they will work without issues on the reliable Pi's. The good cards always detects no faults via "fsck". If I leaned towards SD card being unreliable, I can conclude that all Pi's are good, but some Pi's are more resilient than others (after all, with reliable cards, these Pi's will run for days)...

In any case, please do let me know if you test more and discover any other valuable data.

Thanks!

[Montschok]

...sometimes, when I did "fsck" on the SD cards that were not too reliable, it would report first partition (vfat/msdos) to have dirty-bit set, etc, yet they will work without issues on the reliable Pi's. The good cards always detects no faults via "fsck"...

Hmm... from what system did you run fsck? From a separate computer I assume (ie not the pi itself)?

I checked mine from a separate computer, and it never showed any errors, even when doing a destructive write test (badblocks with the -w flag). There were definitely errors in the actual data on the sd card though, as it failed to boot after a while (iirc my computer didn't even find any partitions when that happened, but it was a while ago so I may be wrong about that).

I only have 1 pi so I can't test the sd card on another one.

Edit : It's been quite a while since my previous tests, so I decided to try again. Currently installing Raspbian from NOOBS LITE 1.3.8 (which should contain the updated firmware according to previous posts). I should be able to report my results within a day or so.

Edit2 : After it finished installing, I ran "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade" and added "shutdown -r +2" to /etc/rc.local (before exit 0) and ran "shutdown -r +2" from the console. That was over an hour ago, and so far it's still working, so the issue I had may actually be fixed now. (Note : This will apparently stop the boot before you're able to log in. In case anyone else has this issue : fix it by adding the word single to cmdline.txt (in NOOBS), after the next boot you'll get the root login and you can edit rc.local.)

Edit3 : It's still working after more than 8 hours of reboots, so I consider the issue I had to be solved

[hidekiai]

Hi,

Sorry I hadn't replied after being poked by Andrew earlier... Yes we did fix a bug rather recently that Andrew found certain SD cards failing to boot (left with the green LED slightly glowing)

The bug was fixed and a new version of the firmware pushed (the important thing is the bootcode.bin file you should be able to copy on a new version of this with no ill effects

Otherwise, I've got another Pi on my desk exhibiting similar effects which I'm going to look at tomorrow morning, will get back to you when I know whether yours is a new issue

Thanks

Gordon

Hello, I am following up in an inquiries to find out whether you've made any progress on determining the cause of why some Pi's would be able to boot and some won't. Also, my superior had mentioned that we can send you an SD card that has issues booting and 2 Pis (one that will boot, another that won't) if you need a set to test against.

thanks in advance.