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From: Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.raspberry-pi
Subject: Re: Just got a Pi1B. What can you actually do with it these days?
Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2025 17:00:57 +0100
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Theo <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> My main reason to pick a Pico over a Zero is reliability: I can be
> sure a Pico will boot up every time, but I find it a lottery whether a
> Pi will successfully boot or whether it's corrupted its SD for some
> reason or another and won't boot.  I thought PiOSs was supposed to
> automatically fsck the disc and reboot with everything clean if a
> problem was detected, but for whatever reason this doesn't work - I
> have to keep pulling cards and fscking them before the Pi will boot
> again.
>
> Anyone have any insights into why this is?  These Pis are getting
> power pulled from them rather than a proper shutdown, but in the case
> where they're sensors or whatever it's just a fact of life they get
> power interrupted without shutdown sometimes.
>
> One of my Pis has OpenWRT which I thought would help the corruption
> issue as it's designed for routers which don't modify their flash very
> often, but even that's got to the state of not booting - I need to
> investigate further.

I’ve just restored a Pi which had been gradually accumulating filesystem
damage (without any reboots/power cycles) over time. It’s not the first
time.  My interpretation is that commodity micro-SD cards are mostly
designed and tested on the assumption that the user will be storing a
lot of smartphone photos on them, not a live root filesystem, and
accordingly wear out disappointingly fast. But this is just guesswork.

-- 
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/