How do I go about reflashing?

Issues 2502 Pixie
1

Hi, sorry if this is a simple problem to solve, but I’ve recently been having longer loading times on 2502 Pixie (around 45~ seconds), even with the patches on my RG35XX SP. I haven’t turned it on in a while, if that means anything.

I wanna go about reflashing the SD card to see if it’ll help with the issue, and I just want to know if there’s anything special that I should do. I have an SD1 and SD2 which I have copied and backed up the files over to my PC. Is it possible for me to flash the SD card again using the Raspberry Pi imager and then just copy the files back over, or is there more to it? Thank you for any help in advance!

2

Nothing special. My advice would be to remove SD2 during the process. Then just flash SD1 like you did on original install via RPi Imager as you’ve stated

3

muOS appears to be designed such that all the normal user configurable stuff is in the folders on the FAT partition. There are 5 other partitions that don’t show up in windows because they’re “UEFI System Partitions” which windows will ignore (actually ext4 and others).

So yea just reimage a new card and copy the files back to the FAT partition.

The only other things I might suggest are:

  • Reformat the whole card first as something (exFAT, FAT32, NTFS, don’t think it will matter too much as long as it can handle the size of the card) and fill the card with all 1s or random data.
  • Once it’s filled, run chkdsk /r /offlinescanandfix /x Z: (where Z: is whatever the drive letter the sdcard is assigned)
    The main point of this is to force the flash controller on the card (what’s called the translation layer) to try to write and read most of the blocks on the card to give it a chance to remap bad flash ram blocks if it needs to.

Don’t worry too much about whether the chkdsk finds errors. Just reimage the card after that.

I think you can also get Rufus (another imaging utility) to do the same thing if you select the “test for bad blocks” option.

Either way this is a slow operation but probably worth doing if you think there might be a reason to reimage an sdcard