On 18/10/2019 19:00, NY wrote:
> In fact the only time I ever had the system drive go bad, preventing the
> Pi from booting, was after a tidy "reboot" which should have shut things
> down gracefully.

Back in te day when I ran a business with 70+ PCS and half a dozen UNIX
servers, I only once had a machine fail to boot after a power cut.

a VERY heavily lioaded SCO unix machine right in te power supply limits.

We had the servers set to autoboot after power was restored.
What happened was that power went out,  then a few seconds later, it was
restored but 'browned out' a few seconds after that. All the PCS managed
to have enough stored in their main capacitors to survive. Not the SCO,.
That went down in the middle of I suspect fsck....

It never booted off that drive again. Fortunately most of te data was on
another three drives, but some of the data on the system drive was
irreplaceable, and never got replaced either.

Ther is a lesson here and that is that whilst EXT2 and friends are
massively robust, they are not indestructible, and machines that boot
automatically like a pi are vulnerable.

My advice if its mission critical, is to have as vanilla and replaceable
a boot device,  as possible. Data disks that seldom get written to are
far far less likely to suffer power related irrevocable failures.

In my own pi the SD card contains no moving data of any importance. Only
logs IIRC.

Everything else is network mounted. And the network server is a linux
PCX86 with NO AUTOBOOT ON POWER!!!

Or you could use a SATA USB drive.

I learnt my lessons. When the power flickers and dies and then comes
back  on, I make a cup of coffee and a snack and wait for 45 minutes
before I reboot.

BTDTYGTTS



--
There’s a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons
that sound good.

Burton Hillis (William Vaughn, American columnist)

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