Hello guys,

So after a bit of troubleshooting I thought I would share it on here, should any one else ever wonder or find themselves in such a situation.

Last week I (actually my wife ) asked way too much of my little 800VA Multi, but luckily the inverter tripped with a very loud beep to let me know its not having any of it.

But, after the trip I noticed I was no longer getting data logged to VRM, at first I suspected the Pi itself, but it turns out my SD card somehow got corrupted, I formatted the card, and put the VenusOS back on the card and bam, everything looks like its working again?

I find it strange that the SD card got corrupted since I mean, it gets its power from a DC source?  

32 minutes ago, PJJ said:

I find it strange that the SD card got corrupted since I mean, it gets its power from a DC source?  

Once upon a time, many years ago, I replaced an ignition harness on a car. Oh wait... I think I told this story before. I'll make it short. I worked on the high voltage side and on the first start the fuel pump fuse blew... making me think I did something wrong. But it was just dumb coincidence.

My motto ever since: Never underestimate dumb coincidence.

SD-card quality sucks. They get corrupted. You often don't notice until the next reboot (because Linux caches commonly used bits into memory quite aggressively and can continue running for days or even weeks with a filesystem rotting away under it).

9 hours ago, plonkster said:

My motto ever since: Never underestimate dumb coincidence.

Ok well, I guess that answers that, is there perhaps a spesific SD card class or something I should look for that would make it less prone to dying?

1 hour ago, PJJ said:

Ok well, I guess that answers that, is there perhaps a spesific SD card class or something I should look for that would make it less prone to dying?

I have no idea. At my previous job there were guys who said something about buying the better class, and they pretty much bought only Sandisk.

+1 on SD cards failing. I think I've had 3 fail in the 6 years with 2x RaspberryPi's running (Not Venus, this is for my personal use) and it's completely random. The first one was expected as that was a card that came with a phone years ago which I just formatted and used which one day stopped working. Another was the one I had my hopes on lasting, but also just randomly stopped. The last was after I switched off power without shutting it down and then it didn't come back up.

Yes, you can pay a bit more to get a better card, but it depends on how much you want to spend and how important the data is. For me I just make a backup of the card and the apps every now and then so that if a failure happens I can just restore the card or reinstall and restore backup of the apps.

On 2018/12/11 at 7:30 AM, PJJ said:

Ok well, I guess that answers that, is there perhaps a spesific SD card class or something I should look for that would make it less prone to dying?

In my experience :  no. 

Luck of the draw, but ultimately they all will fail. 

Best advice: backup regularly ( or always flash 2 cards, store the backup in a "save" place) 

2 hours ago, demaniak said:

In my experience :  no. 

Luck of the draw, but ultimately they all will fail. 

Best advice: backup regularly ( or always flash 2 cards, store the backup in a "save" place) 

I must say I got quite lucky with my current SD card, I see its been almost a year, and its still going, and I have not had to flash it once

11 hours ago, PJJ said:

I must say I got quite lucky with my current SD card, I see its been almost a year, and its still going, and I have not had to flash it once

I've never bothered much with the Rpi for anything, but about two months ago I threw hassio on a pi and used it to control a few Sonoffs... and this week it failed. It's a Sandisk card... actually a fairly good brand in my experiene. So yeah... not really too impressed with the average Rpi+sdcard solution.

28 minutes ago, plonkster said:

I've never bothered much with the Rpi for anything, but about two months ago I threw hassio on a pi and used it to control a few Sonoffs... and this week it failed. It's a Sandisk card... actually a fairly good brand in my experiene. So yeah... not really too impressed with the average Rpi+sdcard solution.

I didn't buy Sandisk again, I bought the smallest most expensive one I could find (weird logic I know) and it was a Kingmax SD card, and so far its been great.