PinePhone Sculpt SD Card Problem (was: Re: Announcement: Sculpt OS 23.04 released)

[John J. Karcher]

On 6/7/23 12:26, ttcoder at netcourrier.com wrote:
> Howdy fellow genodians,
> 
>> As another nicety, I'd like to share that the new version in principle
>> supports the 2 GiB model of the PinePhone. However, the larger presets
>> (morph and jitsi) will most probably cause trouble on the 2 GiB variant.
> 
> Gave it a try (at last), installing and running 2023-04-26 from the depot.
> I had the genodians.org tutorial in front of me, and I might have figured out the root problem that causes downstream issues:
> 
> - when invoking Expand... Confirm... it does not work for 20 seconds at all, in fact it returns immediately.
> - and the file system size label still says "15 MB", instead of indicating that the FS has been expanded to the full SD-card size (15 GB)
> - hence even after clicking "Default" (which didn't work, had to click "Use" instead) and...
> - ...activating Wi-fi and getting an IP address, any network download still remains stuck at "expanding" or even "fetching".
> This probably all goes back to the FS not (?) being expanded I guess.
> 
> If I'm the only one affected that's no biggie, but posting in case others are experiending something similar.
> 
> Cédric

I had a similar, but not identical, situation on my 3GB version.  In my 
case, anything involving writing (expand, default, etc.) would never 
complete, but slow the system to a crawl in the process.

The problem was something about the SD card - it works fine in desktop 
Linux, but refuses to work in PinePhone Genode.  I tried quite a few 
things, but nothing worked.  Changing to a new SD card solved the 
problem, and now I have a fully functional system.

One thing I noticed, which may or may not be useful: Running fdisk in 
Linux on the card with the Genode image will complain about the 
partition block.  If you then press "w" for write (without making any 
other changes), it will write its corrected version to the card.  (I 
tried so many things that I forget if this one was important or not.)

  Hope it helps,

   John J. Karcher
   devuser at alternateapproach.com