I think my Micro SD card is broken, when in my Pi everything is fine but I’m trying to create a backup on Windows before I do an update, every time I plug it in to windows the Windows Bootable partition keeps disconnecting so I get a message like “D: is unavailable” It’s not my card reader because other cards work fine, I’ve also tried on my Mac and get the same issue.
On the odd time I’ve started to create a backup in Win32 Disk Imager it will again disconnect and I get a CRC error.
I have a couple of questions:
Is there anyway I can create an image of the SD while it’s running in my Pi?
Is there anything I can try to get the windows boot partition to work?
Is there a way I can back up all my settings so I can get another SD and copy them over?
What do you mean with windows partition? Most images have an ext4 system partition and a boot partition (I think it is fat32), some images only have one single ext4 partition.
There is no window partition on the image.
Also if you try to backup the card with windows: it can’t handle ext4, maybe this is the problem you’re facing.
Yeah I guess he mean the vfat partition on RPi images. Looks like it’s not accessible by Windows as well as MacOS. At least for the vfat partition access should be possible.
You could try following as a basic check on your system.
> /forcefsck
reboot
# then after reboot
journalctl -t systemd-fsck
Yeah I mean the part you can read in Windows, it’s around 128MB and contains config.txt, overlays folder etc, it opens the folder when I plug in the card but then quickly closes and says not accessible and even though I can still see the other partition mounted when I try to back it up I get an error about the location or handler not found.
On the odd occasion when this partition is still present I can start backing up the SD but after a while it gets disconnected and I get a CRC error.
I’ve just turned the Pi back on and tried that:
root@DietPi:~# journalctl -t systemd-fsck
-- Journal begins at Fri 2023-04-07 12:16:11 BST, ends at Fri 2023-04-07 12:24:15 BST. --
Apr 07 12:16:11 DietPi systemd-fsck[142]: Please pass 'fsck.mode=force' on the kernel command line rather than creating /forcefsck on the root file system.
Apr 07 12:16:11 DietPi systemd-fsck[157]: e2fsck 1.46.2 (28-Feb-2021)
Apr 07 12:16:11 DietPi systemd-fsck[157]: Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Apr 07 12:16:14 DietPi systemd-fsck[157]: Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Apr 07 12:16:18 DietPi systemd-fsck[157]: Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Apr 07 12:16:18 DietPi systemd-fsck[157]: Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Apr 07 12:16:19 DietPi systemd-fsck[157]: Pass 5: Checking group summary information
Apr 07 12:16:20 DietPi systemd-fsck[157]: /dev/mmcblk0p2: 66179/7768320 files (1.5% non-contiguous), 28739314/31183360 blocks
Apr 07 12:16:21 DietPi systemd-fsck[229]: Please pass 'fsck.mode=force' on the kernel command line rather than creating /forcefsck on the root file system.
Apr 07 12:16:21 DietPi systemd-fsck[259]: fsck.fat 4.2 (2021-01-31)
Apr 07 12:16:21 DietPi systemd-fsck[259]: /dev/mmcblk0p1: 376 files, 65138/258077 clusters
I’ve just tried but got the same thing, windows opens the folder for a second then it says
D:\ is not accessible. The Volume does not contain a recognized file system. Please make sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and that the volume is not corrupted.
If I try to use Win32 Disk imager I get
An error occurred when attempting to read data from the handle. Error 23: Data error (cyclic redundancy check)
Thanks for the help, which is my device? Both Pi’s are running the same size SD so I’m not sure which is the broken one connected via USB one and which is this pi’s SD card
root@PlexExtra:~# lsblk -o name,fstype,label,size,ro,type,mountpoint,partuuid,uu id
NAME FSTYPE LABEL SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT PARTUUID UUID
sda 119.1G 0 disk
├─sda1
│ vfat 128M 0 part c26b8af2-01 9041-5D00
└─sda2
ext4 119G 0 part c26b8af2-02 14bb0923-da43-46db-919f-a1b300fdc73f
mmcblk0
│ 119.1G 0 disk
├─mmcblk0p1
│ vfat 128M 0 part /boot d5900763-01 447A-61ED
└─mmcblk0p2
ext4 119G 0 part / d5900763-02 0c775223-1871-4eeb-8d39-1eb6a931dc4f
root@PlexExtra:~#
Yeah I figured it’s going to break at any point, luckily I can back up my Sonarr and Prowlarr configs through the web ui every day so when it finally does completely break I’ll just need to set up transmission and Plex again
Seems like the partition table itself is broken. None of these is able to read if from external system?
fdisk -l /dev/sda
parted /dev/sda print
Kernel logs could give a hint:
dmesg -l 0,1,2,3
But when it’s physically dying, not much which can be done and probably not worth to waste much time, i.e. I agree best is, if it still boots, to rescue as much as possible as fast as possible and setup a fresh system.