Boot issues > Even after working OS installtion > Poss SD card corruption ?

Tech-Ninja

Hi there.

I was hoping that you could help me with an issue that I've been experiencing.

Background:
I've bee busy setting up a Raspberry Pi environment for my brother and my
nephews.

(Both Raspberry Pi OS (Debian Bookworm) and Retropie) on the same SD card.

Reason is the kids want to play both -
Open Jedi Knight (via Debian Bookworm)
Then Retropie for the old skool NES / SNES / Neo Geo / ect, ect. games.

I have been able to do this on my Ras Pi-5 without any issues at all.
Works brilliantly.

I used the Raspberry Pi imager software on my host PC to burn the image to the
SD card (Raspberry Pi OS).

A couple of test boots, work well. I can boot and log into the OS, download apps,
makes changes Generally use the OS without issue (via Raspberry Pi OS).

After that works, I then downlaod and install Retropie manually.
Which again, seems to work well.

N.B. I have to change the locale to US_eng for the Retropie to build succesfully.
(I'm based in the UK).

Issue:
Once I have downloaded and written the OS image file to the SD card
(It appears to work perfectly).

After I remove the SD card from the Pi, put it back into my USB card reader.
I then copy accross a whole bunch of ROMS to the Retropie dirs.
Again these copy across without any issues.

However, once this is all done. I put the SD card back into the Pi.
Reboot, and that's where things go sideways.

It then it totally refuses to boot at all.
I just get a black / blank screen and nothing else.

Troubleshooting:

I have completed this whole process twice now =

1.1. Burnt the Raspberry Pi OS to SD card

1.2. Then insalled Retropie manually (worked fine).

1.3. Removed SD card from Pi, put into USB card reader (on host PC)
Copied accross loads of ROMS.

Put SD card back into Pi-4, rebooted then the issue appears =

2.1. It now refuses to boot. from the SD card in the Pi.

2.2. Putting the SD card back in the card reader on the host PC
the rootfs partition is sometimes accessable.

When it's accessable, the partition can be mounted, but although the capacity
shows correctly (showing filled with data via df- h or lsblk).
When viewing in Dolphin file manager the partition "appears" empty.

Using Gparted - The partition is shows up, and I ran fsck on it.

I then see the following response:

3.1. After 1st FS check =

A few thousand lines showing errors (supposedly fixed) as this:

Inode 1180349 was part of the orphaned inode list. FIXED.
Inode 1180350 was part of the orphaned inode list. FIXED.

3.2. Summary (Again after 1st FS check)

rootfs: ***** FILESYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****

207822 inodes used (2.67%, out of 7774208)
337 non-contiguous files (0.2%)
47 non-contiguous directories (0.0%)
# of inodes with ind/dind/tind blocks: 1/1/1
Extent depth histogram: 188259/132
10804556 blocks used (34.76%, out of 31084032)
0 bad blocks
1 large file

172905 regular files
15316 directories
1 character device file
0 block device files
0 fifos
1123 links
19589 symbolic links (19418 fast symbolic links)
2 sockets
------------
208936 files
e2fsck 1.47.0 (5-Feb-2023)

3.3. The 2nd round of fschk shows the following:

Check and repair file system (fat32) on /dev/sdd1  00:00:02    ( ERROR )
    	
calibrate /dev/sdd1  00:00:01    ( SUCCESS )
    	
path: /dev/sdd1 (partition)
start: 16384
end: 1064959
size: 1048576 (512.00 MiB)
check file system on /dev/sdd1 for errors and (if possible) fix them  00:00:00    ( SUCCESS )
    	
fsck.fat -a -w -v '/dev/sdd1'  00:00:00    ( SUCCESS )
    	
fsck.fat 4.2 (2021-01-31)
Checking we can access the last sector of the filesystem
Boot sector contents:
System ID "mkfs.fat"
Media byte 0xf8 (hard disk)
512 bytes per logical sector
2048 bytes per cluster
32 reserved sectors
First FAT starts at byte 16384 (sector 32)
2 FATs, 32 bit entries
1044480 bytes per FAT (= 2040 sectors)
Root directory start at cluster 2 (arbitrary size)
Data area starts at byte 2105344 (sector 4112)
261115 data clusters (534763520 bytes)
63 sectors/track, 255 heads
16384 hidden sectors
1048572 sectors total
Reclaiming unconnected clusters.
Checking free cluster summary.
/dev/sdd1: 403 files, 34707/261115 clusters
grow file system to fill the partition  00:00:01    ( ERROR )
    	
using libparted
libparted messages    ( ERROR )
    	
GNU Parted cannot resize this partition to this size. We're working on it!

The SD card is pretty much brand new, and only had a different version of
Linux imaged onto the card prior to me getting the card

This OS worked without any issues - IIRC it was a Debian install with LXDE.
Not sure which version of Debian though.

I've done this on my own Pi (both a 4 and a Pi 5) without any issues at all.

Questions:

Do you have any ideas why this appears to work properly (image is burn to
SD card and is bootable and usable) - But then fails once I have installed
Retropie and the game ROMS
Do you think that the SD card is faulty / on it's way out ?
Is there anything else that I'm missing to get this up and running properly ?

TIA for any help or advice

Details:

Host PC OS: Linux (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS)
Kernel: 6.8.0-60-generic-64-bit
KDE Plasma: 5.27.12

Raspberry Pi: Model 4B with 4 GB of RAM

OS 1: Raspberry Pi OS (Debian Bookworm)
OS 2: Retropie

SD Card:
Micro SD 128 GB
Manufacturer: XUTE
Speed / Class: U3 (30 MB /sec)

Tech-Ninja

[EDITED]
@mitu

1). Apologies - I didn't intend to double post.

When I tried to publish my original post - It looked like the system freaked out and deleted it / didn't post it at all.

So I created a new post (thinking that the 1st post was never created).

Thanks for merging them together.

2). I've deleted the 2nd post (as it was just a copy of the original post
and very lengthy - So trying to make this thread more readable.

Thanks for the advice so-far.

mitu

Please don't double post, I've merged your 2 posts into one.

Have you tried to transfer the ROMs over the network, without connecting the mSD to your PC ?

Judging from the parted error it's either your card or the USB reader that's acting up and corrupts the partition(s). There are utilities to test the mSD and detect if it is 'fake' (i.e. lies about its capacity), but if your USB reader is faulty then they'll not work correctly.

mitu

@Tech-Ninja said in Boot issues > Even after working OS installtion > Poss SD card corruption ?:

When I tried to publish my original post - It looked like the system freaked out and deleted it / didn't post it at all.

First time posters need to have their topic approved first (it's a spam countermeasure). Their subsequent posts are not subject to moderation.