Writing invalid partition table

[Tim B]

Dear Satellite users,

we have been enjoying the use of Satellite for our new exhibition,
where we were able to replace several more computers with Raspberry Pis
running Satellite. Thanks!

http://timesup.org/mtm-prague

We have still one problem with a machine going blank after
OMXplay-ing a long video several times through, so I am building a new
copy of the software to test back here in our studios. In the process, I
have found that one SD card has twice been "invalid" as the written disk
image has had a invalid partition table - it extends beyond the physical
end of the SD card. But the SD card is 8 GB, more than one needs for the
Satellite image.

Any suggestions, other than downloading the image again and seeing what
happens...

Best wishes,

Tim



--
Tim Boykett Time's Up ⌛
t...@timesup.org http://timesup.org
(Austria) 0664 5466 566 (Australia) 0401 933 574

[Edgar J. Berdahl]

Hi,

For the working SDHC cards that you had, did you run

disable-flash-writes

in order to make the memory cards last longer?

I have found a few "8GB" micro SDHC cards that are actually a bit smaller and so sometimes don't work. So far this time, I haven't been able to move the partitions around using gparted, which worked for all of the images I made in the past.

Do you have any 16GB cards to try? I have one of these, and it works fine. I'm trying another one at the moment ...

Best!

—Edgar

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[Tim B]

Hi Edgar,

  Interesting that some SD Cards are smaller. This might be the problem, as we have used our main SD cards for the installation and the backups on site and I am using a different card here at the studio.

However we seem to be working our way towards a real problem. An installation that runs for some time has been happy, then it crashed. The screen, when we attached a keyboard that woke it up again, showed errors like
INIT: Id "6" respawning too fast. Disabled for 5 minutes

When we rebooted, the image would not boot, getting a "kernel panic" and stopping. So I insterted the SD card into a laptop and found that the root partition is corrupted: it has lost its identity as an extended format partition and become an unknown partition.

Does anybody have any idea what might cause this?

Browsing the forums, I have noticed a lot of people complaining about similar errors after installing a system on a larger SD card. Could there be any connection here, that larger SD cards do not work on Raspberry Pis? I cannot find anything....

Best,

Tim

[Edgar J. Berdahl]

Hi Tim,

What size SD card were you using most recently?

Had you run the command

disable-flash-writes

?

Best,

Edgar

[Tim B]

Hi Edgar and all,

it was a 16GB card and we ran disable flash writes. To be exact, we did the same thing as disable flash writes manually, as the whole card was set up on a linux machine with all program files installed. The disable-flash-writes script changes the fstab file and then replaces the handle-remount file:
sudo cp handle-remount.ro handle-remount

I am concerned that the while structure of the partition was disturbed - parted does not even recognise it as an extended partition. So perhaps the partition table is being corrupted somehow....

The "corruption" takes a long time - days. We set this up as a test because the gallery where we have an exhibition has noticed that the screen goes blank after a day or three and they need to "re-boot" the Raspberry Pi. Then it (usually) works fine. But our test here at the studio did not work so fine.

Cheers,

Tim