mokanman

Thanks for this. I'll look into it and see what I can do with it.

Thanks for the very informative response tkaiser. It sounds like I need to find another approach. My desire is to be able to burn a replacement so that in the event that my SD card becomes toast or my installation becomes so hosed that diagnosis is either too time consuming or just plain impossible (for me, anyway). I'm guessing the use of DD would possibly be a route to go but I was trying to avoid copying the entire SD card each night. Also, the complexities of designing something that would work on the fly is fraught with peril (as I've seen from posts over on some Raspberry Pi forums). Are you aware of an existing method for doing this? I currently backup my Raspberry's across the network to my NAS. The NAS and network are 1 Gb but the Pi's alas are 100 Mb. Unfortunately, so is the Potato (I thought I originally saw in the specs where it was 1 Gb but I just looked at their site and nope ). Anyway, if you are aware of an existing method of on the fly backup of an entire Armbian based SD card I'm all ears.

Thanks for the suggestion Igor. Based on tkaiser's reply I won't be pursuing this method any farther unless you can think of easy modifications to the raspbx-update script to address the issues he mentions. In lieu of this, I know you are a big proponent of mainly just backing up non-operating system changes but I want the whole enchilada . My desire is to be able to burn a replacement so that in the event that my SD card becomes toast or my installation becomes so hosed that diagnosis is either too time consuming or just plain impossible (for me, anyway). I'm guessing the use of DD would possibly be a route to go but I was trying to avoid copying the entire SD card each night. Also, the complexities of designing something that would work on the fly is fraught with peril (as I've seen from posts over on some Raspberry Pi forums). Are you aware of an existing method for doing this? I currently backup my Raspberry's across the network to my NAS. The NAS and network are 1 Gb but the Pi's alas are 100 Mb. Unfortunately, so is the Potato (I thought I originally saw in the specs where it was 1 Gb but I just looked at their site and nope ). Anyway, if you are aware of an existing method of on the fly backup of an entire Armbian based SD card I'm all ears.

I was hoping to use the same type of backups for my Armbian Minecraft Server as I currently use for my RASPBX system which uses Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi 3 and sucessfully updates a backup of the entire SD card every night. I successfully modified and ported the RASPBX-BACKUP script to other Raspberry Pi's I have that are fulfilling other tasks and they also make backups just fine. The are also running Raspbian. I ported to my Le Potato running Armbian and when I try to run the initial backup it chokes with the following errors: rsync: symlink "/media/bkup/boot/dtb" -> "dtb-4.14.52-meson64" failed: Operation not permitted (1) rsync: symlink "/media/bkup/boot/uInitrd" -> "uInitrd-4.14.52-meson64" failed: Operation not permitted (1) rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1196) [sender=3.1.2] Error running backups. I'm pretty sure these lines from the script are the offending code: rsync -aDH --partial --numeric-ids --delete --force --exclude '/dev' --exclude '/media' --exclude '/mnt' --exclude '/proc' --exclude '/run' --exclude '/sys' --exclude '/tmp' --exclude 'lost\+found' --exclude '/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules' / ${MOUNTPATH}/ if [ $? -ne 0 ] then echo "Error running backups." unmount_image delete_lo exit 1 fi Not being that familiar with what I'm doing it is likely that the problem is obvious (just not to me). It may relate to the difference between the hardware or more likely the difference in the operating systems. Anyone have a suggestion of how or where to debug this puppy?

Thanks for your reply Igor. As I stated in my first post, I was able to successfully boot with a fresh install. The problem is that I had originally spent a lot of time tweaking the configuration and I am trying to avoid having to go through all those steps again because I did not document everything I did. It would be somewhat of a learning curve though I'm sure I can figure it out if I must. By the way, how was it you hid the output I pasted in my posting? I see the word "spoilers" so maybe that eyeball icon is how it is done? I was looking for a way to do that before I posted but the word "spoilers" didn't seem like an accurate description.

Been away for a while due to wife's surgery. Have had to play nurse maid as well as doing tasks she normally does (not to mention my own). Anyway, with all that going on have not been able to move forward with this issue until now. I did buy a USB to serial UART adapter and it was relatively easy to connect. I am using gkterm from Ubuntu to monitor the boot process and have the following output to share. I removed power to Le Potato when I assumed it was not going to recover from the last set of recurring errors. Not being familiar with what it is showing me I'm hoping somebody can point me in the right direction. There are many occurrences that look like errors prior to those at the end and though some of them may be negligible I have no idea which ones are important:

Appreciate the tip. Found one on eBay I'm going to order tonight.

I already wrote over that card trying the steps outlined in one of the above posts but I created a disk image first using the Disks GUI option for that (I think that is basically a front end to dd). So I think I have number one on your list done. I could use a little more guidance on number 2 and 3 on your list. I have a working SD card (and or can create another one from the Armbian download) but am not familiar with u-boot or what the specific dd command would be. Same with number 3, do I just copy from the /boot directory or is there more to it than that. Please excuse my lack of knowledge on this and thanks for your help.

Are these expensive or hard to come by? If it would come in handy in the future I would get one (some) if it's (they're) not astronomically priced. Will it work on a Raspberry or Banana Pi as well?

Not seeing anything on the screen but I don't know what it may be doing behind the scene. What is a serial terminal? Does my ignorance mean that there probably is not a chance of a serial terminal?

Well, I'm sorry to say this did not work. Since I really have no way of knowing what other files may have been corrupted it is hard to determine what is actually wrong. Anyway, I appreciate your suggestions as it at least validated my thinking. I'm going to head outside and work in the yard for a while so I can rest my brain and exercise my body instead. When I come back in I'll start working on it from scratch again. Since I created an img file from the damaged SD card I'll at least have somewhat of a roadmap to see what I had originally set up. Maybe before I work on recreating I'll do some research on Le Potato LED blink codes. Anyway, thanks again!

Great minds think alike! That's exactly what I've been working on for a couple of hours now. When I first tried to copy, it told me that there wasn't enough space. It told me that the 277.6 GB (on my 16 GB card!) was too much to copy to my other 16 GB card. I drilled down to a find a file in /lib/udev/rules.d called "90-alsa-restore.rules" that was showing a supposed size of 274.9 so I copied all the files but that one (it already existed there with same modified date anyway but only 489 bytes!). File copy is taking a long time. If this doesn't work then I'll just start from scratch I guess.

Thanks for the suggestion. I forgot to mention I tried that already and though it appeared to clean up some stuff it did not help with the boot.

We had a power outage the other day and though I have UPS coverage on all my computers, TV's, switches, router and Arm boards I forgot to shut down the ARM boards gracefully before shutting off the UPS that protects them. Later, all my PI's booted back up just fine but my Le Potato is not responding. I verified that the SD card still shows a Linux system but am not sure what all to look at to repair boot problems. I tested the Le Potato with another fresh Armbian install and it booted up just fine so the hardware is not an issue. I am lamenting not having made a backup of the card before this happened but was still tweaking stuff and didn't think about it (next time I will backup sooner). Anyway, I originally spent a lot of time overcoming all kinds of initial set-up and configuration issues and actually had a Spigot Minecraft server running that was very responsive so rather than spend hours recreating it I was hoping to find a way to recover boot capability. One of the things I had a heck of a time getting under control was a static MAC address (and I don't remember exactly how I finally overcame that problem) which I prefer so my router can assign a specific IP. Since the board is not booting I can't get to any log files, however, I can view the SD card on my Ubuntu desktop computer so I can possibly find something there if it is actually getting far enough to create a log file. Any helpful suggestions for finding a log and/or recovering boot capability will be appreciated.