BeagleBorked


WizardStan

Mega GP Mania
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May 24, 2008
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So I have a BeagleBoard as an always-on computer. This morning I sat down to get to work and... I couldn't ssh into it. No ssh, no vnc. I eventually got a monitor and was able to see that everything appeared to be working fine. I could start new terminals and instances of bash, but attempting to connect to my screen session failed. Creating a new screen locked up the terminal. Changing tty and attempting to log in elsewhere locked up. I eventually narrowed it down to library corruption.


"Oh dear, that's not good" I think. I run off SD card and spontaneous data loss is not uncommon, especially when the power goes out (I've got a UPS but it's only got a 3 minute battery). So I'll just force-reinstall the package this library is in, badda bing badda boom, everything goes back to normal. I've done this before; Pidgin is frequently corrupting itself for some reason and a quick reinstall always gets things running again. What package is it? libc6. Oh, great. For those that don't know, libc is basically the "do all the things" package; without it, there is practically nothing that can't be done. I do it anyway 'cause I've got nothing to lose. First thing it does is uninstall the existing libc6. Second thing it does is start to download the new package. I'm starting to think this might actually work. Halfway through the network dies, the download terminates, and I no longer have the ability to do, well, anything.


So here I am, restoring from a year old backup (I used to take full snapshots monthly, then I discovered that I could simply re-install corrupted packages and everything would work again. D'oh. At least I keep regular /home backups) instead of taking several bags of stuffed animals to the orphanarium.


And that's how a less than perfect SD card kept me from doing my good dead for the day. I should probably get a new card, this one has served me well for quite a few years now.
 
It was a Kingston. I've got some brand new PNY that I need to try.


Unfortunately my card reader has suddenly decided that every SD card I plug in has the write protect switch down.


Fortunately the Pandora works just fine as an SD card reader.


Unfortunately something got stopped up copying a particularly large file and now I can't mount the drive at all.


Fortunately it's easy to recreate the partition table.


Unfortunately this corrupted card has somehow caused my Pandora to lock up.


Fortunately it's easy to restart.


Unfortunately this sequence of events seems to have corrupted something in the Pandora itself and now it won't read any SD cards.


Fortunately it appears that pulling the battery for a couple of minutes seems to have fixed that.


Back to work.
 
It hasn't ended yet. I've had to reformat the card twice. Something about copying 10GB of files over the USB causes corruption.
 
WizardStan: I feel your pain. The issues I've had with SD cards corrupting themselves on my BBXM after a few hours or days of being on ( the FS locks to read only =/ ) I've had no choice but to use something else as a server.. If I could boot from a USB Hard Drive I'm sure that wouldn't corrupt as easily, now if only I could figure out how to tell the XMrevC what the boot device is..


Edit: I forgot to say, when it locks to read only, and I reboot the BB, it seems to get to a point where I can launch a maitence shell. From there, e2fsck can't find any superblocks, so the filesystem is hosed. Only option is to reformat and reinstall the OS.
 
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Days? My beagleboard's uptime is typically measured in months. :P It's actually quite surprising how well this SD card has really held out. I bought it in anticipation of the Pandora I pre-ordered so many years ago. Once I've got a new one up and running, I'm going to h2testw the old one and see just how badly corrupted the physical drive is.


edit: Finally, after several copy attempts and a lot of fsck, I have a working system again. It's incomplete, unfortunately, as I'd made a number of modifications in the year since the last backup, but at least it's something to work with.


edit: get things running smooth last night, started an opkg upgrade last night and went to bed. Woke up this morning to find opkg had crashed with out of memory errors: upgrade downloads all packages and stores them on ramdisk and I'd forgotten to create a swapfile, so RAM filled up. This somehow led to corruption again. Start over. Now things are going smooth again, I've got a 1GB swapfile which I will come back and check on every once in a while and throw more swap at if I need to. Meanwhile, the Angstrom repo is really crawling along: 4KB per second or so. This is going to take a while.
 
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And corrupted again while downloading packages. Somehow so corrupted that when I ran fsck on it, it wiped out everything. This is becoming very tiresome. It'd be much easier of my SD card reader wasn't on the fritz. Anyone know if there's a way to write to something regardless of the right protect tab? I know it's software protected; the Pandora doesn't support it so you can write regardless of whether the tab is on or off. I wish I could do this with the desktop drivers as well. :(
 
Yesterday, instead of plugging my Pandora into my PC and using it as a basic SD card reader and doing the setup and copying of backup on my desktop, I copied the backup to an external hard drive and used the Pandora directly to format the SD card and copy everything there. It was significantly faster and did not corrupt anything! One shot, and it was perfect.


Today, instead of doing an opkg upgrade and just getting everything, I put the output of opkg list-upgradable into a file and have a script handling them one at a time. It's about halfway through and still working perfectly.
 
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