Everything was going so well

[JMac]

@sdetweil managed to find an old SD card and put a fresh Pi OS on it.
Mounted the old one in an adapter, when I run your sudo fdisk -1, I get
fdisk:invalid option–‘1’
Try ‘fdisk --help’ for more information.

I guess I don’t try you recovery command until this one is happy?

Edit to add, I do have - on the home screen - a boot file and a rootfs file from the old SD card.

[OldSunGuy]

@JMac that should be the letter (l) not a number (1) .

sudo fdisk -l

[JMac]

@OldSunGuy well that was a great start :man_facepalming_light_skin_tone:

if I can get the steps above to work, can I get the original SD card to work again? It’s a samsung evo micro sd and way better than the unbranded one I’ve found to try and recover the original setup.

[JMac]

I get the same issue. Sudo fdisk -i returns
fdisk: invalid option - - ‘i’
try 'fdisk - - help fro more information

any thoughts?

[mumblebaj]

@JMac That is not an i it is an l (small letter L)

[JMac]

@mumblebaj that’s worked.
I’m now presented with
/dev/mmcblk0p1
/dev/mmcblk0p2

so follow @sdetweil step above and go with the second option?

[mumblebaj]

@JMac Yeah, would suggest you follow his recommendations.

[JMac]

@mumblebaj cool. Do you have any idea why the initial SD card would be failing to launch when the pi is turned on?
as mentioned above it’s a good quality SD card so am I daft to consider (providing I can recover a copy of my old setup) copying it back onto to the original SD card, am I asking for trouble in the future?

[JMac]

@sdetweil so I ran e2fsck -f -v /dev/mmcblk0p2

got a warning about SEVERE filesystem damage.

went yes and got ]e2fsck : permission denied while trying to open /dev/mmcblk0p2
you must have r/w access to the filesystem or be root.

How do I get around this?

[mumblebaj]

@JMac I am sure Sam is probably still sleeping, but you can try sudo e2fsck -f -v /dev/mmcblk0p2. This should run as root user.