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PHP bricked my Pi

e14 Contributor

Having setup ssh and a vpn and apache and had the pi nicely not doing a great deal for a while I thought it would be fun to try something a little more creative.

 

I decided to install php.  Simple I thought, connecting via ssh from a loaction the other side of town, something like apt-get install php5 should do the trick.

 

It all seemed to go well until it hung up trying to restart apache. Finally it bombed out of that with some error.  I tried a reboot, it refused to do that, claiming 'segmentation fault'. Then after a while the connection dropped and I had to wait until I got home to investigate.

 

I tried pulling the power, nothing, the red pwr light comes on but nothing else.  I tried re-imaging the SD card. Same, red light nothing else. I tried a different image, again nothing.

 

So the question is, have I destroyed the Pi? Or the SD card? Is that even possible over a remote connection?

 

Unfortunately I don't have another SD card to try at the moment, although the one I had seemed to work ok in the PC - well it did fail to rewrite the image the first time until I pulled it out of the writer and put it back in, I put that down to a poor connection.  Could the pi have corrupted the card so badly that it won't work even after two re-images?

Parents

  • @martinuser: One common situation with the Pi is that one makes a simple change like adding a USB device or increasing traffic a little and (reasonably) expects everything else to continue working correctly.  Unfortunately the Pi is not reasonable hardware but highly broken hardware, and so a change in one variable often has unforseen consequences.

     

    As selsinork says, you're very unlikely to have bricked your hardware.  Far more likely is that some seemingly innocuous change has given the Pi indigestion.  I find this regularly as I chop and change things around.

     

    Go back to the simplest Pi setup possible, in particular remove any self-powered hub -- the Pi hates external hubs (even correctly working ones), because its USB handling is utterly broken.  Your VPN application is putting much stress on networking, and the combination of network + other USB events is a known source of Pi failures.

     

    The epidemic of problems that you describe doesn't sound like software failure to me, but operation outside of the very narrow range of functionality that the Pi actually supports.  It's not like most other computer systems that either work or don't work.  Think of it as a dysfunctional child with tantrums and you'll have a more accurate picture.

     

    Morgaine.

  • in reply to morgaine

    I had surmised it probably wasn't really due to php, but it's nice to have someone to blame.

     

    My concern was that I was remote when I made the simple software update, so it wasn't a hardware change that broke it.

     

    Again, the vpn was setup, but I was just using a simple terminal ssh connection so I wouldn't have thought the networking was to blame.

     

    I'll try starting it up without the keyboard and screen in and see what happens.  I'll get another card and try that.  Annoying as  I nearly bought a spare card yesterday, but refused to pay £7.99 for a 4GB card at whatever high street PC retailer I happened to be in - trying to buy a powered hub for the pi.

     

    If the pi is broken, does an element14 t-shirt count as proof of purchase? I think I shredded the invoice the other day in an over zealous olympic shreddathon.

  • in reply to e14 Contributor

    I would second selsinork that the most likely culprit is the SD card.

    martinuser wrote:

     

     

    If the pi is broken, does an element14 t-shirt count as proof of purchase? I think I shredded the invoice the other day in an over zealous olympic shreddathon.

    If they're like other major e-vendors, your order should still be in their system and you'll need to request an RMA (Return Materials Authorization) at the web site before sending it back.

  • in reply to e14 Contributor

    but refused to pay £7.99 for a 4GB card at whatever high street PC retailer I happened to be in

    http://www.mymemory.co.uk/SDHC/Verbatim/Verbatim-16GB-Premium-SD-Card-%28SDHC%29---Class-10

     

    No connection with them, but have bought most of my R-Pi sd-cards from them rather than ebay image   'Free' delivery in a couple of days to the UK from the somewhere in Channel Islands.

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    I thought I should give a quick update.

     

    A new card seemed to fix the problem when I finally got around to buying one.

     

    I tried the old card, for a 4th time, and annoyingly it fired up and worked this time as well....... for about 10 minutes before spurious errors started occuring.

     

    So I think definately a duff card!

     

    Thanks for the input.

     

    M

Reply
  • in reply to johnbeetem

    I thought I should give a quick update.

     

    A new card seemed to fix the problem when I finally got around to buying one.

     

    I tried the old card, for a 4th time, and annoyingly it fired up and worked this time as well....... for about 10 minutes before spurious errors started occuring.

     

    So I think definately a duff card!

     

    Thanks for the input.

     

    M

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