Hello all,

 

earlier I booted up the board (Radxa Dragon Q8B) when it prompted to reboot & update and I allowed it. The update took uncharacteristically long. The OS is running off an SD card. There is no SSD or eMMC installed.

 

Turns out it wiped the install clean. There was about 20 GB of free space prior to the update, now there's 46 GB.

For some reason the user itself and the wifi login are still there, but everything in the home directory is gone. Installed applications and the driver for the wireless card are gone. Chrome add-ons are still there, but reset. The Downloads folder now has Armbian_26.8.1_Radxa-dragon-q8b_resolute_vendor_7.0.11_gnome_desktop.img.xz, which wasn't there before.

 

I didn't lose anything important, just 60 hrs of savegames and a godot project I don't really care about.

 

Could I stupidly have triggered this somehow? I've been running Armbian on three other boards and nothing like this happened on those. So if it's not my fault this might be a Q8B-specific problem.

 

Thanks for any input

Kind regards

 

Edit1: Just noticed there's now another update requiring restart. Weird.

Edit2: Alright, this one was pain free. I'm a bit paranoid now :,-)

Edited October 3Oct 3 by iosef

This Q8B has: 

[ 0.000000] efi: EFI v2.7 by Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

That is not something available in source-code, so who knows what's happens inside. On the other hand, it would be strange that firmware would wipe the whole storage device for the OS.

 

You should think and mention what you did as steps. From what I see is that you did overwrite your SD-card or storage yourself. From RPi forum I know many people use the word 'update' meaning then just overwrite the SD-card with a new image, using some other computer and an imager program. That is then your own fault.

 

A powerful SBC/computer like Q8B can be updated without wiping and 'burning' new image. Instead, you should use a CLI tool 'apt' or GUI tool 'Discover' to get just newer version of various software/system/kernel packages. You can simply keep the SD-card inserted. That is anyway needed when OS runs from fixed soldered eMMC. But there are also people who just remove NVME/SSD from their SBC/computer so they can write ('burn') an new image to it (as they only know that from SD-cards).

Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my initial post. The OS prompted that an update was available. I clicked on the restart and install button. I did not manually flash a new image to the card. That would have wiped my user and wifi credentials, too, which in this case were still there.

 

Well, I'm an idiot.

 

Yesterday I connected a USB drive that I was going to format, but forgot about doing so. That drive had a fresh install of armbian on it. USB is higher in boot priority so the board used that install instead of the SD one.

 

*laughs*

All is well again.

Edited October 4Oct 4 by iosef

59 minutes ago, iosef said:

USB is higher in boot priority so the board

OK, I already wondered why /dev/sda for OS and not /dev/mmcblk0, but I thought maybe the Qualcomm HW/FW was due to that, I have PC's doing it like that, but this explains why your files seemed to have disappeared.

Maybe also a good hint/wake-up call to use some scripts or so to do auto-backup on regular intervals via network. I have that for a decade or so, just use old slow HDD's for that.

If you use Btrfs as rootfs and snapper or so to make last-known-good snapshots, you can transfer those in the background. Also works fine for databases, is atomic, perfect reliability, much better than rsync based when doing that in a running system. A tool call 'btrbk' is standard in Debian, has that all automated:

# apt list btrbk
btrbk/stable 0.32.6-2 all