Hello Everyone.
Recently, I got myself a pi 4 with 8GB of ram. I was rather looking
forward to seeing what it had to offer. Whilst I was at it, I bought my
self a samsung evo plus 128GB Micro SD card, under the assumption that
I could use the larger SD card in the pi4 and take advantage of the
extra storage. You may wonder why I would need the storage. I am working
on a project which could require the storing of rather large files, and
whilst I could store the files to an external device, there are times
when I want them on the card for convenience so I can image the card and
keep a backup. I wrote the latest raspbian lite image to the SD card and
booted the pi.
Everything seemed to be going OK, until I actually tried to use it. The
pi was fine with writing larger files, but when performing operations
such as apt-get upgrade where lots of smaller files were involved and
lots of IOPS were being carried out, the SD card slowed to a crawl. It
would take the pi more than an hour to update.
My next step was to try a different brand of micro SD card. I bought a
128GB Sandisk extreme pro micro SD card. I wrote the lite image to the
card, booted and it was running like a dream. Updating fine within 15
minutes, file copy speeds were amazing, the usual.
Thinking I was on to a winner, I bought myself a second pi4, and bought
another sandisk Micro SD card, exactly the same as the first.
I wrote the image to the card and booted. The pi wouldn't boot. It would
get as far as resizing the partition then hang. I couldn't SSH in or
anything.
Thinking it might be the image, I tried a different one, as another lite
image had been released in early January. Still no joy. OK I thought, it
must be the software.
I tried formatting the micro SD card using the official SD formatter
tool, then tried burning the image with etcher, win flash tool, and
roadkill's disk imager. All 3 times, the pi would refuse to boot and
would hang at the same stage.
I also tried zeroing the card and formatting the micro SD card using the
fat32 file system, again using the recommended guiformat SD software.
Still no joy when the image was written.
I then tried to write the image using DD in linux, using a completely
different card reader to eliminate both the reader and the operating
system/software. The image was successfully written and all of the
partitions were showing up as expected. However, the pi would still not
boot.
I had a 32GB micro SD card handy, so I thought I would try using that
card instead using the above methods of writing the image. Still no joy.
Finally, I tried an alternative image from raspberry-asterisk.org. This
is an image which includes the FreePBX switchboard software. This time,
the pi did boot and I was able to log in. However, the partitions were
not resized as they had disabled the auto resize script. No problem I
thought, I'll use the raspi-config script. The resizing process started,
but hung on syncing disks. I couldn't get it to progress beyond that point.
OK I thought, it could be a faulty batch of cards. I bought another
card, this time I tried with a 256GB microSD card made by sandisk.
Here's where things got interesting. I wrote various images to the card
based on raspbian lite. At first, I had exactly the same issue, i.e
hanging on boot. The FreePBX image would boot, but still wouldn't
resize. I remembered about the latest raspbian lite image which I hadn't
yet tried. I wrote it to the card a few times, trying different
software, different card readers, the usual. On the 4th or 5th attempt,
the image booted fine. The partitions were resized, and I was able to
use the pi as usual and the 256GB micro SD card is working like a dream.
To prove the point, I installed freePBX, which is quite an intensive
installation process involving multiple reboots and plenty of IOPS.
My question is this. Why are the images working sometimes and not
others? The first pi with a 128GB card and the second pi with the 256GB
card are both working fine, but I don't know what changed in the image
writing process to make them work. Also, why do they seem to work on
some cards of the same brand but not others? I have run HW2Test on the
cards to see if they're genuine and they pass the tests.
I have double checked to make sure the partition UUID isn't changing
after the resize script runs, and it seems to be fine.
If it was an issue with the cards, surely they wouldn't boot or work at
all. Are we still at the stage that the pi4 can't support booting from
larger micro SD cards? If so, then it's certainly a shame now that
larger SD cards are cheaper than they were. Smaller cards aren't going
to be made forever. I also tried resizing the partitions manually on the
FreePBX image using another linux box. The resize went absolutely fine,
but the pi refused to boot from the new partition after the resize. I
haven't yet tried making sure the partition UUID is the same, as I was
giving up by this point. Why should I have to use another linux system
to resize the partitions? I am wondering if it is to do with the way the
pi powers down after a reboot. If the partitions are resizing and the pi
is restarting, perhaps the reboot isn't completing? I did try turning
the power off and back on when the pi was hanging, still no joy.
I have also tried the cards on a known working Pi4 with the same
results. Does anyone have any theories as to what could be going on? I
can't think of anything else to try at this stage. I could switch to
another operating system such as arch, but there are certain projects
where I would prefer to use raspbian if possible. I could try different
brands of cards, but I am unsure which brands to try next. Also, I don't
want to end up with too many cards that I can't use. I've never had this
issue with previous raspberry pi's. I have some model 2B's and model
3B's and all images have worked fine on there, even if I've used a
larger SD card such as 64GB. Does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks for reading,
Mo.
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