SOS Please: Recovery After Dirty Shutdown (Raspberry Pi)

Support & Help Requests Raspberry Pi
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#1

I had an unexpected power outage the other day. I was working on my Raspberry Pi (with MATE) at the time, and as a result of the power loss it obviously shut down. When I got power back five minutes later, the machine wouldn’t boot. It comes up to the Ctrl-D prompt, and a second or two later the MATE logo with the chasing dots underneath replaces that. The machine just “sits” there.

I know what the problem is because I’ve been there with other Linux systems. The Ctrl-D prompt serves a purpose everywhere but on the MATE/Pi setup; it does nothing but switch to that logo screen described above. I know how to work around it because I’ve swapped the MATE card for my Raspbian one so I can run fsck on it. After this, the card is back to normal.

What I don’t know, and which I hope someone here can tell me, is whether there’s a way for me to add a recovery method that will allow me to forego the roundabout repair? Even though I have the means to do the described roundabout fix, I’d much rather keep it self-contained.

Thank you

#2

I could make the restore from your backup comment, BUT there are options.

Add init=/bin/sh to cmdline.txt then you can boot into root at the command prompt and attempt recovery.

PS Ctrl-D DOES WORK on the Pi, unless the system is damaged.

#3

Thank you. I do appreciate the cmdline.txt suggestion, which I became aware of after posting this. The whole idea though is to keep things self-contained. I want to avoid pulling the card and putting it somewhere else to get it to a functional state (your suggestion or the process I described). There are times when someone else uses this Pi, and it’s beyond their ken to do either method should they end up with a dirty shutdown…