I've been running two Witty Pi 5s each attached to a Pi wildlife camera. These have been running successfully with Pi Zero 2W / trixie for over 7 months.
A few days ago one of the systems stopped running its schedule, so the Pi stopped booting up at the scheduled time.
I'm able to manually restart the Pi using the Witty Pi 5 on/off button, and can run the wp5 command. However this shows that the previously programmed schedule appears no longer to exist.
When I access the emulated flash drive through the USB port, the drive mounts but it is called 'Untitled', not 'Witty Pi 5', and the conf, log, and schedule folders appear to be missing on this drive.
No file operations appear to be possible on 'Untitled', including an attempt to recreate the schedule folder and drag and drop my schedule.wpi file there.
My question is this: is it possible to re-initialise the 'Witty Pi 5' file structure on the emulated flash drive, as it appears to have become corrupted ?
(I have also tried re-installing the firmware, and this appeared to work, but did not resolve the problem described above).
Thanks, Matthew aka guldberg
My question is this: is it possible to re-initialise the 'Witty Pi 5' file structure on the emulated flash drive, as it appears to have become corrupted ?
It seems the partition table of the FAT12 partition is corrupted. The possibility of fixing does exist, but it is difficult and is not always feasible.
The risk of partition table corruption stems from the existence of two paths for writing to the partition: one from your computer and the other from the firmware itself. When write requests from these two paths cross, the partition table may become corrupted.
The firmware itself already takes all measures we can imagine to avoid such corruption: the firmware always ejects the USB-drive before trying to write into the disk. However the actual situation is very complicated and the corruption may still happen under some unknown scenarios.
If you already give up the old data on the disk, you may use the software to format the disk and restore it to default state (choose "13. Administrate...", and then choose "[2] Format Witty Pi disk").