HELP!!! System just shuts down!

hansolo77

I just don't know if it's possible to do what I want to do that way then. My intentions were to keep everything internal, with one power cable (the original PSX). There's just no more room to add another power supply and a hub just to drive the hard drive. I'm literally bending the case as it is fitting everything inside. I agree though, having another power source for the drive would probably solve the issue. But it only seems to pop up when the drive is getting hammered. Any other time, it plays fine.

pjft

@hansolo77 Why not get a USB thumb drive instead? Do you really need a hard drive?

It's not as much a matter of "when it pops up" but the fact that it does, at any point, as that in itself may cause system failure (not enough power to finish writing, reading whatever, and something be corrupted at that time).

hansolo77

@pjft said in HELP!!! System just shuts down!:

Why not get a USB thumb drive instead? Do you really need a hard drive?

Because i have 3.5TB of roms and videos. :)

pjft

@hansolo77 Have you considered running them from a Shared drive instead?

hansolo77

I haven't really considered it, because I wanted it to be mobile. I don't like having things like my server running when it doesn't have to be.

pjft

@hansolo77 I suppose the next question then is obviously if you do need to have your entire video and ROM collection in that set up, but that's a personal choice.

You may do some research for lower-power-consuming hard drives, but I can't promise anything before you try them.

hansolo77

I have had some success... I still can't get a proper boot up log to identify the issue, but I managed to set up a tripod and my camera to take a picture of the screen. Sorry the image is so large, it's a nice camera. :) And the big white spot is the flash. I had to have the flash on because I couldn't get the picture to come out clear enough without it. The text on the screen goes by so fast, I was getting double and triple lines repeating in the picture.
http://image.ibb.co/cgNF75/IMG_1533_1.jpg
Anyway, it looks like it runs just fine up until it reaches the switch script from rc.local. Is there any way to edit the filesystem without having to boot up the Pi? Like, is there a Windows program that lets you access the data partition of the SD card? I'd like to try and just #comment out the line calling the script to see if I can get it to recover.

hansolo77

More Progress...
Swapped out the SD card with the one from my NES. It does the same thing, so I thought it might be the Pi. Then I tested the PSX card in the NES and it did the same thing too. So I'm not sure what's going on. I put the NES card back in the NES and it works fine. So that's a relief. The PSX card in the PSX or the NES doesn't work. So I'm going to try and re-image the card to see if I can recover from square one. Bummer.

hansolo77

Looks like it was probably the SD card. I didn't have a backup of the "working" system, so I'm starting from the beginning again. But the reimage seems to be working ok. I made a backup of the "broken" card, so maybe I can somehow get in to recover in the future. But then again, starting from the beginning is probably a better way to go and do things right.

hansolo77

Reporting Progress Update...
Got the hard drive working and the skin changes in place. My buttons don't work yet, but the LED does. I just need to get the button scripts installed (POWER and RESET). I will say this.. I think I know what caused the corruption. The PiStation build I'm doing has a microSD card ribbon cable, to make access the the SD card external. When I screwed the top down on my case, I crushed one of the wires in the ribbon between the screws. During all of my re-building today, I kept it simple without using that cable. Everything now works right. I tried hooking up the cable again, and sure enough, I get filesystem read/write errors on my screen. So I've ordered a replacement. Cheap enough, but coming from Taiwan so it might take a couple weeks. The other thing I noticed... since the POWER and RESET buttons aren't working yet, I've had the power going straight into the Pi. I've had ZERO undervoltage warnings flash up on my screen. BUT, once I put the Mausberry circuit into the mix, all of a sudden those lightning bolts started showing up. So I don't know if I have a faulty circuit, of it maybe the circuit isn't capable of supporting the volts/amps. I need to try and get in touch with them and see if they can recommend a solution.

As an aside, but related question.. Does the "Powerblock" people use work in a similar fashion? Detecting a button push then sending a signal to the Pi to shut down, then cutting out the power? If so, maybe it can handle the power?