[congyiszizu]

Chaps, I have been stung before by simply pulling out the power cord following a raspbmc freeze. My 1tb hard drive that I had hooked up to a powered subs hub partitioned and it has taken me 1 month to recover some of the data.

So my question is, when this happens again, what can I do that won't partition my hard drive?

[DBMandrake]

Ssh in and run 'sudo reboot'. Usually a freeze will only be an XBMC freeze not the underlying Linux OS. This will do a controlled reboot that won't corrupt any files.

If you can't ssh in or even ping the Pi then pulling the plug is the only choice though.

[dandnsmith]

Keep current backups of the partition table and partitions

[ajp2k14]

Thanks for the 'sudo reboot' suggestion, I was looking for an answer to this too. I've experienced problems when pulling the plug or doing 'shutdown -r now', not being able to boot or getting a kernel panic when booting. Could that be because of a corrupted SD or USB caused by improper shutdown?

[dmdsoftware]

Thanks for the 'sudo reboot' suggestion, I was looking for an answer to this too. I've experienced problems when pulling the plug or doing 'shutdown -r now', not being able to boot or getting a kernel panic when booting. Could that be because of a corrupted SD or USB caused by improper shutdown?

It sounds like it could be. You might want to do a fsck on the partitions on the SD card. I had a similar issue and fsck fixed it. i found sometimes it's beyond repair and a restore from a backup copy was necessary. That's why its a very good idea to store dd images handy; to avoid rebuilding.

[bac522]

Don't know if they have fixed watchdog software in the Pi yet, but you could install it to just reboot the Pi and/or restart xbmc when it hangs.
http://www.sat.dundee.ac.uk/psc/watchdog...stall.html

[ajp2k14]

Thanks for the 'sudo reboot' suggestion, I was looking for an answer to this too. I've experienced problems when pulling the plug or doing 'shutdown -r now', not being able to boot or getting a kernel panic when booting. Could that be because of a corrupted SD or USB caused by improper shutdown?

It sounds like it could be. You might want to do a fsck on the partitions on the SD card. I had a similar issue and fsck fixed it. i found sometimes it's beyond repair and a restore from a backup copy was necessary. That's why its a very good idea to store dd images handy; to avoid rebuilding.

Any suggestions on how to dd the SD card? I'm mostly a Windows user so maybe it would be easier to just clone the SD card in Windows using some Windows software (Win32diskimager?)? I suppose I could just put the SD in my PC and copy the files? The other files/settings are on my USB but I've started using XBMC backup addon for that..

[DBMandrake]

Don't know if they have fixed watchdog software in the Pi yet, but you could install it to just reboot the Pi and/or restart xbmc when it hangs.
http://www.sat.dundee.ac.uk/psc/watchdog...stall.html

Raspbmc already runs a watchdog:

Code:

root      1758  0.0  0.0   1628   188 ?        Ss   15:02   0:00 /usr/bin/raspdog --device=/dev/watchdog --interval=5

Most "freezes" are just XBMC hanging though - the watchdog won't do anything about those because the underlying OS has not crashed.

[bac522]

Don't know if they have fixed watchdog software in the Pi yet, but you could install it to just reboot the Pi and/or restart xbmc when it hangs.
http://www.sat.dundee.ac.uk/psc/watchdog...stall.html

Raspbmc already runs a watchdog:

Code:

root      1758  0.0  0.0   1628   188 ?        Ss   15:02   0:00 /usr/bin/raspdog --device=/dev/watchdog --interval=5

Most "freezes" are just XBMC hanging though - the watchdog won't do anything about those because the underlying OS has not crashed.

That's true, in the past think I just wrote scripts to watch a process and restart it if they locked up.