Blind leading Blind

Morning everyone.
I’ve been asked to try to help a friend of mine who has an “Acorn” PC system which needs tech support.
It was built by her husband, who was a bit of a techie. Sadly, he died suddenly, a few years ago.
The system has an email account on it, which she still uses.
Recently it stopped booting, instead giving a message:

RISC OS 464MB
ARM1176JZF-S Processor
Piccolo Systems SDFS
Error: Disc error 02 at :0/00000003BAEDE000 (Error number &201C0C7)

The “miniature PC” comprises a Raspberry Pi board of as yet unknown age/model, plus little more than a few adaptor boards (power distribution, USB-SATA), and a DVD writer drive.
As far as I can see there is no physical hard drive, so I’m assuming it’s configured on the SD card that also carries the operating system.
I’m familiar at a user-level with Raspberry Pis, as I use them for a Squeezelite audio system. I’m not familiar with this operating system, or Linux in general.

What I’m looking for is advice on whether it may be possible to “repair” the “hard drive” without losing any email info that’s on it?

Thanks

I can’t say I’m an expert on these things, but it looks at least like the SD card isn’t completely broken, since the OS has been loaded from it, which is a good sign. Someone more experienced will be along shortly, I expect.

I would remove the card from the Pi and do a low level copy to a known good SD card, Linux’s dd or Windows’s Win32DiskImager should be able do this, but I’m not sure what will happen if they hit an unreadable block, they need to be set up to complete the copy. This is because SD card can fail completely if they are getting dodgy and there are further writes.

Then get another new SD card and install a new copy of RISC OS on it, when it’s and running attach a USB card reader and put the copied card in and see if it is readable by RISC OS. If there are errors DiscKnight may be able to fix them.

dd’s conv=noerror option should let it continue on read errors; I can’t remember if it writes a block to the destination so that everything stays in the right place, though.

The advice given in this thread is good and will likely see you home.

However, if you need help, there are RISC OS companies (such as myself – R-Comp, or CJE) or others who will gladly assist your friend by phone/post or in person. The email (and computer) should be recoverable, and that approach has the advantage of introducing your friend to the folks/companies who can support her going forwards, which some people find quite re-assuring.

For many people in your friend’s situation, they can feel quite stranded when it comes to RISC OS once their partner has died, since they don’t know who to turn to. Knowing there’s a network of companies and users out there can be re-assuring). Additionally, it can be helpful to discuss their options going fowards, and how to salvage/migrate data and files depending on their future plans.

Thank you all for this advice.
I’ll try reading the SD card into my PC with DiskImager, then either try to make a new copy, or as a last resort create a new SD/OS.
The problem with this all is that I don’t know exactly how my friend uses the system, and unless it looks exactly as it did before, she, and I, will be stumped. She is of advanced years, and a complete technophobe. She relies on icons being where she expects them to be, to click on them to get what she wants.
I also think this little “Acorn” may be the source of a dedicated WiFi network which I can see, but can’t access, as we don’t know the password. There is the “main” WiFi via a BT router, and I may have helped a little by moving her laptop, phone and printer onto that. A real tangle of systems, and I don’t know the reasoning behind them.
Perhaps we should all do better at documenting our domestic technology in case of the unforeseen!