Summer too hot? DietPi does not boot anymore

Troubleshooting
1

Hi,
as written my DietPi does not boot anymore.
The LED blinks twice (like normal), but i cannot find the diepi in the network.

Now i plugged it on a monitor (by hdmi) and there is only the cursor in the upper left corner of the screen - nothing else.

The sdcard (200GB) seems ok and was detected in another linux-pc.

Is there a tutorial how to recover the configuration?
I made backups when i updated so can i copy those to a new dietpi-installation and restore everything?

Regards
norrin

EDIT: Or maybe i can repair the sdcard?

2

Hi,

if you are able to connect the SD card to another Linux system, you could do some file system check to ensure your SD card is healty

fsck -a /dev/sdxx

sdxx would need to be replaced with your device name on the other Linux system.

Another option is to copy the backup to an alternative usb stick. The device would need to be ext4 and while coping data, you would need to ensure to keep file system permissions. If the whole backup was copied, you could flash a new version of DietPi and restore the backup during the inital setup. For this you would need to set following inside dietpi.txt

# Restore a DietPi-Backup on first boot: 0 => disable | 1 => interactive restore (show list of found backups) | 2 => non-interactive restore (restore first found backup)
# - Simply attach the drive/disk/stick with contains the backup. All attached drives will be mounted temporarily and searched automatically.
AUTO_SETUP_BACKUP_RESTORE=1
3

Hi and thank you.

The boot-partition is ok, but the ext4-partition is damaged:

norrin@spectrex2:~$ sudo fsck /dev/sdb2
fsck von util-linux 2.34
e2fsck 1.45.5 (07-Jan-2020)
Die Größe des Dateisystems (laut Superblock) ist 47997184 Blöcke.
Die physikalische Größe des Gerätes ist 6054144 Blöcke.
Entweder ist der Superblock oder die Partionstabelle beschädigt!
Abbrechen<jy>? ja
norrin@spectrex2:~$

Unfortunately the backup is on the ext4-partition, so i have to try to repair it anyway.

EDIT:
Repair did not work.
:frowning:
Thanks anyway!
Next time i backup on another device.
Learning by errors…

4

MichaIng
can you have a look if there is a chance to get something from the SD card back?
probably repairing the superblock might gonna work :thinking:

5

Yes, probably it’s possible. To check the locations of the superblock backups:

mkfs.ext4 -n -m "$(tune2fs -l /dev/sdb2 | mawk '/^Reserved block count:/{print $4}')" /dev/sdb2



  • This command does not create the filesystem, but is a dry-run (-n) and assures that the reserved blocks count is the same, as dietpi-drive_manager sets them to zero, while the default is 5%.
  • mkfs.ext4 prints the physical location of the superblock and its backups, when it would create the filesystem, and when we assume that it is identical (most importantly size), then those match the actual superblock locations.
  • These locations can then be used with e2fsck -b <superblock_location> /dev/sdb2 in the hope that one backup is intact and enables fsck to repair the filesystem.