Author Topic: How many SD cards have you bricked? (Read 7979 times)

grippie · « **on:** August 26, 2015, 11:03:55 pm »

Just got my Pi2 and a simple case. I ordered a cheap snes controller to get this up and running and play around with it.

downloaded retropie and loaded it to an 8GB samsung micro SD. plugged everything in and it booted up perfectly right into emulation station with placeholder systems. perfect! I expanded the file system and rebooted perfect! then i went to reset it without doing a sudo hault (pulling the plug) and now I can't even get the SD card to be recognized by windows or mac. It shows the drive where my usb card reader is plugged in but doesn't recognize the card at all. No programs like sdformatter recognize anything in the drive.

is it basically a piece of plastic garbage now? I ordered a power switch as well so i can shut it off without unplugging it (after shutting down nicely through ES) but i'm nervous to screw up another sd card. they aren't expensive, but if my buddy accidentally unplugs it or whatever is it going to ruin more cards???

DaOld Man · « **Reply #1 on:** August 27, 2015, 01:23:04 am »

I havent bricked any... yet.
Since you cant re-format it with sdformatter, maybe the card just crapped out?
That mausberry switch works pretty good, but I dont think it will protect against power outages and un-pluggings.
I have not tested it yet, I plan to make a backup on my windows of the sd card and do some experimenting, been working a lot of hours this week and havent had a lot of time to work on this.
Im thinking either a big capacitor, or a rechargeable battery, to supply current to the pi long enough for it to safely shutdown, in the event of a main power outage.

geeteoh · « **Reply #2 on:** August 27, 2015, 01:32:00 am »

I have not bricked any. I have two RPi1s and two RPi2s. I mostly shut them down with halt commands, but I have also just removed power without issue. I have, however, only owned them since this spring. I do pull disk images from them from time to time just in case. I run cheap class-4 8gb and 16gb cards right now.

Slippyblade · « **Reply #3 on:** August 27, 2015, 01:35:50 am »

I've not bricked any. I've got 3 Pi's. An old model A and two B+. I've cycled through my cards a LOT when experimenting with distros with no problems. All class 10's though. I've got a 4gb, two 16's, and a 32.

pbj · « **Reply #4 on:** August 27, 2015, 10:14:05 am »

Better off using an old Xbox, to be honest.

Still waiting on something useful to do with my Pi 2....

grippie · « **Reply #5 on:** August 27, 2015, 11:13:34 am »

Good to hear that there are a bunch of positive results with not bricking. It was so nice... i plugged it in and it worked beautifully only to have it go blank when i power cycled it.

I have a few 16gb cards i use for my tablet and modded PSP but i don't want to use those as they are way overkill. I'll head up to the store and get one today. best buy has some cheap 8GB ones on sale. Maybe i'll order a few backups off of amazon too.

Vigo · « **Reply #6 on:** August 27, 2015, 11:51:53 am »

Just chiming in, because the only SD card I had crap out on me was a cheap Best Buy one. Decent cards are cheap if you look for them in the right places, why not go for a little overkill?

Also, those cheap best buy ones are usually not class 10, I don't touch anything under the 10 speed anymore after I noticed some lag on my video camera.

Newegg has a g.skill 32gb micro SD for $9 today, and a 64gb for $17. Both class 10 speed.
http://promotions.newegg.com/NEemail/Aug-0-2015/TheHotList_27/index-landing.html?

Maybe consider getting an upgrade for your tablet card, and use your 16gb.

pbj · « **Reply #7 on:** August 27, 2015, 12:10:28 pm »

I'd stay away from Kingston cards. They seem to do a little more creative calculation than others when it comes to specifying capacity. SanDisk has been fine.

grippie · « **Reply #8 on:** August 27, 2015, 01:02:59 pm »

Thanks for the advice guys.

I bought one of these today. I'm not usually a huge fan of sandisk but their midrange cards are pretty solid from what i've experienced.

It is the ultra version and not the base version, i was hoping that it would help with reliability.

grippie · « **Reply #9 on:** August 27, 2015, 01:04:39 pm »

Holy Crap. That other card I had must have been a class 0 because this new card finished the disk imaging in about 35 seconds. The other card i tried took about 1/2 hour to do the 2 GB retropie image...

yotsuya · « **Reply #10 on:** August 27, 2015, 01:19:54 pm »

Quote from: grippie on August 27, 2015, 01:04:39 pm

Holy Crap. That other card I had must have been a class 0 because this new card finished the disk imaging in about 35 seconds. The other card i tried took about 1/2 hour to do the 2 GB retropie image...

Hmm. There were probably already issues with that card, and it was going to die out anyway.

Vigo · « **Reply #11 on:** August 27, 2015, 01:46:55 pm »

Awesome! Yeah, I have had good luck with those Sandisk Ultras as well.

grippie · « **Reply #12 on:** August 27, 2015, 01:50:55 pm »

I did steal that card from an old HTC phone so no guarantee with quality there! Hope it was bad because I would like to do some cool projects with the Pi. Seems like a great little machine but bricking the card in the first 5 minutes had me worried. I just don't want to have to treat the thing like it's made of glass. I'll shut down properly though the software going forward, but man if my little guy starts walking soon and decides to go chew on daddy's little gaming rig and pull it out of the wall I could have problems.

Quote from: Vigo on August 27, 2015, 01:46:55 pm

Awesome! Yeah, I have had good luck with those Sandisk Ultras as well.

Awesome, good to hear Vigo.

grippie · « **Reply #13 on:** August 28, 2015, 10:41:13 am »

Just an update. The new sandisk card is working like a champ. Guess you get what you pay for. I have emulation station up and running with all of the base consoles (nes,snes,sms,gen,tg16) I need to go in and change the artwork (genesis > mega drive)

for some of the stuff and scrape the data, maybe change the base theme a bit but overall it works great.

The power switch is really nice, It just cuts power on the cable so you don't have to keep unplugging it from the wall when your done.

nitrogen_widget · « **Reply #14 on:** September 02, 2015, 12:43:31 pm »

I've corrupted cards by just pulling the plug.
But, since I setup my gpio's to run the halt command when a button attached to them is pressed I've had zero issues.

grippie · « **Reply #15 on:** September 03, 2015, 01:48:10 pm »

Quote from: nitrogen_widget on September 02, 2015, 12:43:31 pm

I've corrupted cards by just pulling the plug.
But, since I setup my gpio's to run the halt command when a button attached to them is pressed I've had zero issues.

Nice, i'm working on a solid model for a 3D printed PSP style handheld that I want to trick out so making sure it halts properly is key.

For this setup, I just make sure i have a terminal where i can do a 'sudo shutdown -r 0' to reboot if i get stuck in an emulator that has problems. like unconfigured controller.

I'm really having trouble getting mame4all to run my roms, even though I used clrmamepro to reduce them down to 375b or whatever version they take. I just tried FBA with a supposedly known to work set, but I was still only ale to launch like 1 in 5 games.

still in progress...

nitrogen_widget · « **Reply #16 on:** September 04, 2015, 02:01:38 pm »

Quote from: grippie on September 03, 2015, 01:48:10 pm

Quote from: nitrogen_widget on September 02, 2015, 12:43:31 pm
I've corrupted cards by just pulling the plug.
But, since I setup my gpio's to run the halt command when a button attached to them is pressed I've had zero issues.
Nice, i'm working on a solid model for a 3D printed PSP style handheld that I want to trick out so making sure it halts properly is key.

For this setup, I just make sure i have a terminal where i can do a 'sudo shutdown -r 0' to reboot if i get stuck in an emulator that has problems. like unconfigured controller.

I'm really having trouble getting mame4all to run my roms, even though I used clrmamepro to reduce them down to 375b or whatever version they take. I just tried FBA with a supposedly known to work set, but I was still only ale to launch like 1 in 5 games.

still in progress...

How much ram are you dedicating to GPU?
Some Roms don't run unless you have at least 175 mb dedicated to gpu.

DaOld Man · « **Reply #17 on:** September 05, 2015, 02:52:33 pm »

How do you check or change the amount of ram for the GPU?

grippie · « **Reply #18 on:** September 10, 2015, 09:40:31 am »

Quote from: nitrogen_widget on September 04, 2015, 02:01:38 pm

How much ram are you dedicating to GPU?
Some Roms don't run unless you have at least 175 mb dedicated to gpu.

It's a pi2 so I just left all that at default to start. It says i'm missing files when I try to run some of the games. I tried FBA with a list of supposedly known working roms and some are working but not most... I really only want about 50 arcade games on this portable machine, so I wouldn't mind hand picking them, but finding each working version will be a bit of a pain.

DaOld Man · « **Reply #19 on:** September 18, 2015, 08:18:02 pm »

My SD card just bricked by itself.
Played Quake iii last night before turning it off.
Tried to play again this afternoon and got errors. tried running fsck but didnt help.
Reformatted the card and re-installed the retro pi image and all is well.
Well not quite. i lost all my roms, got to re build all them.
I must make a backup of the card once I get it all back.

I dont know why the card bricked. I was playing around with the video settings, so maybe I did it, but Im pretty sure I restarted it after messing with the settings and it did just fine. (last night).

grippie · « **Reply #20 on:** September 21, 2015, 01:07:48 pm »

Yea i really need to make a backup of my card now that I have all of the settings and everything done. It took a long time to get the controls set up like i like it with my SNES controller. I finally just copied the correct settings to the specific system config and then i could control what each systems buttons do. Each one is slightly different for th best button combos. works great now except I can't map save in mame. I know that's blasphemy, but games like ghost's n goblin's REQUIRES multiple sessions lol.

EvilNuff · « **Reply #21 on:** September 28, 2015, 10:01:03 am »

I have been working on a bartop for my girlfriend for Xmas and it is currently using a RPi B. I find that if I don't run the shutdown the sd card corrupts frequently. The card is fine after re-imaging but is this unusual? This seems like a pretty significant downside to Pi's?

obcd · « **Reply #22 on:** September 28, 2015, 02:39:02 pm »

SD cards have their own controller that does some background tasks.
One of those tasks is erasing pages of it's flash memory so that they can be used again.
Due to that, data can become corrupted if you don't properly shutdown. (Like you noticed)
The only solution is to make the rootfs on the sd card read only. When the sd card isn't written,
the background tasks don't need to work. I have a couple of such setups, and there is no corruption anymore.
It's not a simple task, as some linux stuff needs some rootfs folders to be writable.
Further, you will need a writable location for your settings and high scores.
There are solutions for debian using aufs and a ramdisk overlay, but aufs is not enabled in the pi kernel,
so trying that approach requires recompiling the kernel. Other reliable solutions use a backup power device and shutdown the system
properly when the main power disappears. I have no idea if such solution is available for the pi.

EvilNuff · « **Reply #23 on:** September 29, 2015, 11:13:15 am »

Thanks obcd that's a perfect amount of detail about what I was looking for!

pbj · « **Reply #24 on:** September 29, 2015, 11:19:18 am »

Meh, I've thrown my Pi 2 back in the desk drawer. It is a useless device.

yotsuya · « **Reply #25 on:** September 29, 2015, 03:16:57 pm »

Quote from: pbj on September 29, 2015, 11:19:18 am

Meh, I've thrown my Pi 2 back in the desk drawer. It is a useless device.

Mine has been lying dormant since April, at least.

Slippyblade · « **Reply #26 on:** September 29, 2015, 04:50:41 pm »

Hmm. Sorry guys. I use my SNES Pi box at least twice a week. Still haven't actually "finished" it though. Someday.

yotsuya · « **Reply #27 on:** September 29, 2015, 05:01:21 pm »

Quote from: Slippyblade on September 29, 2015, 04:50:41 pm

Hmm. Sorry guys. I use my SNES Pi box at least twice a week. Still haven't actually "finished" it though. Someday.

Yeah, I have other irons in the fire, so the Pi is very low priority.

DaOld Man · « **Reply #28 on:** September 29, 2015, 10:39:18 pm »

I like the pi, and it does have a few drawbacks, but the cost makes it very desirable.

Dig it out, dust it off, hook it up and play around with it. Pretty amazing device. It can do many things other than just play games.

yotsuya · « **Reply #29 on:** September 30, 2015, 07:35:51 pm »

Quote from: DaOld Man on September 29, 2015, 10:39:18 pm

I like the pi, and it does have a few drawbacks, but the cost makes it very desirable.

Dig it out, dust it off, hook it up and play around with it. Pretty amazing device. It can do many things other than just play games.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure when I do come up for a use for the Pi, it's not going to be to play games.

DaOld Man · « **Reply #30 on:** October 01, 2015, 11:09:42 am »

Quote from: yotsuya on September 30, 2015, 07:35:51 pm

Yeah, I'm pretty sure when I do come up for a use for the Pi, it's not going to be to play games.

Perhaps an automated project?

yotsuya · « **Reply #31 on:** October 01, 2015, 11:14:59 am »

Quote from: DaOld Man on October 01, 2015, 11:09:42 am

Quote from: yotsuya on September 30, 2015, 07:35:51 pm
Yeah, I'm pretty sure when I do come up for a use for the Pi, it's not going to be to play games.

Perhaps an automated project?

I'd like to maybe set up some sort of carputer.

DaOld Man · « **Reply #32 on:** October 01, 2015, 11:18:28 am »

Quote from: yotsuya on October 01, 2015, 11:14:59 am

I'd like to maybe set up some sort of carputer.

A Kit?

yotsuya · « **Reply #33 on:** October 01, 2015, 11:22:30 am »

Quote from: DaOld Man on October 01, 2015, 11:18:28 am

Quote from: yotsuya on October 01, 2015, 11:14:59 am
I'd like to maybe set up some sort of carputer.

A Kit?

No, just something off the top of my head. GPS/Jukebox type of setup.

pbj · « **Reply #34 on:** October 01, 2015, 11:30:10 am »

I've got bluetooth on my car stereo and cellular data everywhere. No need in my life for a car computer.

yotsuya · « **Reply #35 on:** October 01, 2015, 11:43:28 am »

Quote from: pbj on October 01, 2015, 11:30:10 am

I've got bluetooth on my car stereo and cellular data everywhere. No need in my life for a car computer.

Yeah, but I'm trying to come up with a more practical use for this Pi2 than craming MAME on it. I already have CoinOps on my old xBox.

Jamesbeat · « **Reply #36 on:** December 15, 2015, 06:02:11 pm »

Bit late to the party, but have you tried gparted to try rescuing that card?

Download a Linux live CD and give it a go.

Fishinfiend · « **Reply #37 on:** January 02, 2016, 09:09:53 am »

I am not sure.if itmworks with SD cards but when you make any bootable USB drive the only way to revert back to the original capacity in windows is with HP Disk Utility, so i would give that a try.

http://download.cnet.com/HP-USB-Disk-Storage-Format-Tool/3000-2094_4-10974082.html

MacGyver · « **Reply #38 on:** January 25, 2016, 04:27:55 pm »

Mine kept locking up up when transferring roms, it was the micro SD card, swapped it out, no more lock ups.


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