SD card recovery

[MarkHaysHarris777]

Another thing that some of us are experimenting with is building a card (manually of course, which takes a particular set of linux skills) that has multiple partitions for the various parts of the filesystem (current linux images have two, /boot mmcblk0p1 and the rootfs partition mmcblk0p2).

There should actually be about 10 partitions; and the filesystem should be mounted on them like so:

/boot
/
swap
(extended, part 4)
/usr
/opt
/usr/local
/var
/tmp
/home

Usually when corruption occurs it is going to occur in either /var or /tmp (sometimes /home, but not usually). Almost never does /boot, or / get clobbered. /var and /tmp are easily rebuilt without reloading the entire card. The downside of this is that at this time there is no automation to construct these cards, and you have to know what you are doing.

I am toying with providing a service on-line to Pinesters who might like to purchase SD cards at a nominal rate, through paypal, and I would send out a preformed SD card , fully partitioned , and preloaded with the gnu+linux distro of choice; thinking of providing the dbian, ubuntu, and Gentoo images.

We'll see. In the mean time, dive in and give this a try. Partitioning an SD card is no more difficult than partitioning a disk drive.

PS Some of the partitions can be mounted RO; but, the most important of these is the /home part... it can be mounted noexec and nosuid. This gives an additional layer of security. Also, note that I placed /home at the end. That way whatever space is left on the card (after you assign /usr and /opt for software) can be expanded in user space which is of course your home directories.