Arch Linux

beachcoder

Member

Registered: 2009-10-08

Posts: 130

Bad superblocks on any ext filesystem on second partition of sdhc card

Hello out there,

I'm having an issue with two Transcend 32 GB, level 10 memory cards. One is an SDHC, one is microSDHC. I wanted to format them for the archlinuxarm installation for a Rasperry Pi. Therefore, I'm not sure if to put this message here or in the archlinuxarm forum or elsewhere... it might be a pure hardware problem. But all search results on the web where not helpful.

Well, I followed the steps from the tutorial at http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/raspberry-pi, created partitions with fdisk, then mkfs.vfat on /dev/sdc1, then mkfs.ext4 on /dev/sdc2. Secondary failed with the information, that there was a problem writing the superblocks. Mounting is not possible. Then, I tried to format it as ext3 and ext2, but all filesystems report bad superblocks on mounting. I tried the same procedure with both cards (both where factory new) and get the same problem.

Running ckfs.ext4 reports maaany errors, and running it with -y yields in a message that the filesystem still contains errors after execution. May it be the card-reader? Or the card themself?

Any suggestions would be grateful!

Thank you!

beachcoder

Edit1: Creating only ONE partition with an ext4 filesystem works perfectly without any errors. Mounting is no problem! So it must be a problem with the second partition on the sdcard...

Edit 2: Interesting! Creating the partitions the other way around is no problem, also with the filesystems. But such a system doesn't boot.

Edit 3: I've now tried to write the Arch Linux Image from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ ... when I try to write the image with dd, I always get "No space left on device" but always on different sizes... isn't that crazy?

[root@kestrel raspberry]# dd bs=1M if=ArchLinuxARM-2014.06-rpi.img of=/dev/sdc
dd: error writing ‘/dev/sdc’: No space left on device
874+0 records in
873+0 records out
915406848 bytes (915 MB) copied, 53.9723 s, 17.0 MB/s
[root@kestrel raspberry]# dd bs=1M if=ArchLinuxARM-2014.06-rpi.img of=/dev/sdc
dd: error writing ‘/dev/sdc’: No space left on device
742+0 records in
741+0 records out
776994816 bytes (777 MB) copied, 28.0471 s, 27.7 MB/s
[root@kestrel raspberry]# dd bs=1M if=ArchLinuxARM-2014.06-rpi.img of=/dev/sdc
dd: error writing ‘/dev/sdc’: No space left on device
772+0 records in
771+0 records out
808452096 bytes (808 MB) copied, 26.0498 s, 31.0 MB/s
[root@kestrel raspberry]#

Funnily enough, after a few tries, the SDHC card worked and I was also able to boot the Pi, but the microSDHC card still has this problem. I think it is a bug in the card reader or something.

Last edited by beachcoder (2014-08-29 07:43:06)