

<b>Minimising the chances of SDHC corruption</b>

Every time you 'power-off' without using the 'sudo shutdown now' command, you risk corrupting the SDHC card.

Whilst this appears a lot less likely with newer versions of the Pi hardware, current versions of the System software insist on writing extensive 'log files' to the SD card.

Worse, in an effort to address the limited RAM, the latest Pi Operating System has gone down the Windows route of 'swap files'.

Needless to say, continually writing logs and swapping bits of the System between RAM and the SD card more or less guarantees eventual corruption on pulling the power plug.

To combat this, you can make the system partition 'read only', move the logs to a RAM disk (tmpfs) and disable the swapfile system. Edit the file systems table by typing :-

<i>sudo nano /etc/fstab</i>

at the command prompt.  Change the default contents of this file to that listed below.

<i>
proc            /proc               proc    defaults                    0   0
/dev/mmcblk0p1  /boot               vfat    ro,noatime                  0   2
/dev/mmcblk0p2  /                   ext4    defaults,noatime            0   1
none            /var/run            tmpfs   size=1M,noatime             0   0
none            /var/log            tmpfs   size=1M,noatime             0   0
</i>

Save this file and exit to the command prompt.


To disable the swap file system, type the following commands at the command prompt.

sudo dphys-swapfile swapoff
sudo dphys-swapfile uninstall
sudo update-rc.d dphys-swapfile remove