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[Mephisto]

Um. I think that goes well with a shirt that says "My eyes are down here" because you'd need eyes where your nipples are to make use of a tiny monitor at that angle.

It's a pneumatic monitor arm. Your monitor mounts to the flat bit that's impaling itself in that poor asshole's chin flesh.

[King Zultan]

The 32GB Micro SD card in my phone decided to die yesterday by somehow unformatting itself, neither phone or computer recognize the card as being formatted and the only option they give is to format it, and I'm wondering if there's a way to get my stuff off of it.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[delphonso]

I found these two:

PhotoRec might work, though I have no experience with it.

GParted definitely works for partitioning/unpartitioning, and apparently have a recovery attempt tool. It's worth a shot. Both of these are free and open source, so...at least give it a shot, I guess? Is your SDCard off-brand? If so, it might just be reaching the end of its lifespan and might need to be replaced, unfortunately.

[wierd]

Testdisk, the companion of photorec, might be able to salvage the filesystem also.

[King Zultan]

Is your SDCard off-brand? If so, it might just be reaching the end of its lifespan and might need to be replaced, unfortunately.

I don't know weather it's off brand or name brand but it's ether a Onn or PNY, also it shouldn't be reaching the end of life as I bought it earlier this year.

[LordBaal]

Most likely is a off brand or a knock off. Pen drives and microSD are particulary vulnerables to being fake products.

[delphonso]

It could have been a software thing from the phone, but, yeah SD Cards on the cheap can die fast if read and written a lot. I lost one 64gb one that was used in a raspberry pi only after a few months.

[LordBaal]

A pretty common tactic is to sell them tricked so the show more space than what they have and/or simply so cheaply made that they have a very poor write/read cycle count.

On all accounts data ends up lost, sometimes forever. Back in the university a lot of people got scammed by 4Gb and OH MY GAWD 8Gb pendrives when 500Mb was more or less the norm. They ended up being 32 Mb chips that corrupted everything once a certain amount of data was put into them.

[methylatedspirit]

It could have been a software thing from the phone, but, yeah SD Cards on the cheap can die fast if read and written a lot. I lost one 64gb one that was used in a raspberry pi only after a few months.

Doesn't help that Raspbian (and most* distros for the Pi, from my understanding) use disk swap instead of ZRAM swap, substantially shortening the life of SD cards in the process. Here's a guide on how to set ZRAM up, and throw out disk swap entirely.

https://haydenjames.io/raspberry-pi-performance-add-zram-kernel-parameters/

Alternately, if you never ever need to save data to the SD card, ever, you can instead go into raspi-config and go to Performance Options > Overlay File System to prevent writes to the SD card. I don't know the Linux-fu to explain it beyond "sets up an overlay filesystem in RAM, so all writes that would go to the boot disk go to RAM instead".

Warning: This gives the Pi amnesia. Any files you save to the SD card will be lost on the next reboot.

*Fedora might be an exception, assuming its RPi build does the same ZRAM setup thing my Fedora 35 Workstation install does. However, Fedora doesn't officially support the RPi 4 yet. "We do not (as of 24 November 2021) officially support the Raspberry Pi 4 in any Fedora release." Some stuff involving firmware flashing, then installing Fedora via the aarch64 DVD ISO is possible, but do that at your own risk.

[delphonso]

Aye, this was how I learned two lessons - first, I toggle off swap on anything I plan to use for more than an experiment, and second, to not buy knock off sdcards.

[King Zultan]

How do you know weather a SD card is good or a knock off?

[delphonso]

Trusted markets, price matching expected price, physical inspection. I bought a cheap Chinese SD card - so I wasn't duped into buying a fake Kingston or something, but I guess that sort of thing can happen, depending on where you live.

[King Zultan]

Guess I should be good in that regard as all the SD cards I've purchased have come from a big name store.

[LordBaal]

Usually knock off imitations has differences in packing shape, size, hologram stickers, quality of the materials, printing, logos and more. The last three also for the card/drives themselves. There are some sites, youtube videos that can help discerning an original product from a fake one, but scammers always try to innovate so there is no saying they copy all the apareances perfectly.

Price is a good indicator too, if is too good to be true, probably is because is not true. Not to say there are imitations sold at prices on par of the original products.

Finally yes, buying from recognized and/or trusted places is your best bet. Sites like SanDisk indicste that your best way to be safe is to buy from authorized dealers only.

[Starver]

I haven't tried it with Raspbian/SD-Card, but you could take a note from the Live CD Linuxes (Linii?) that let you place whole or 'differential' mountpoints on the 'host' machine's HDD[1] to overcome the default state of recurring amnesia.

You could even try to make the whole startup work from that USB-platterdrive (not sure if the Pi firmware does (or can be asked to) use that in leiu/advance of a valid SD card), but a minimal loader[2] that makes all RW mounts reside elsewhere. (Perhaps put /swap and other latent amd transient high-volume data areas upon an USB Ram-based dongle if that gives better IO performance than a more mechanical or even remote read/write location, and easily replaced if/when it starts to 'wear out'.)

I haven't done so much fiddling with this sort of obsessive tweaking myself, but if someone hasn't perfected this setup already and made a handy guide (or even setup-wizard) for this already then I'm very much surprised.


[1] Possibly across a networked drive, whether Cloud or Fog or NAS variety, but takes a bit more effort than a 'keystone' .cfg file on the host's drive to explain to the receptive hard-booting nonRW startup what options had previously been decided in a previously booted-up session.

[2] That you can keep an image/copy of in the event of the first finely-tuned SD going bad from too many reads or other loss of integrity.