Testing for hardware faults

Question

I have recently been having a lot of issues with my raspberry pi 3 b+. Many seg faults and weird errors coming with programs like apt and certbot. This is on a fresh install of raspbian lite and I think the issue must be something hardware related. I feel that it could either be an issue with the sd card or memory. Are there any tools I can use to check for faults in these parts?

I had the pi sitting on top of a router and after a week I noticed the PLA case it was in started warping so the temperature of the case was probably at about 60c so maybe something on the pi overheated and started causing issues.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to diagnose intermittent faults like this reliably

There are several approaches. Two summarize two common ones

1. Try a different device or sd card and see if the problem goes away
2. Run a stress test or benchmarking application for an extended period of time to see if there is a consistent error that appears in ram , io errors, or random CPU exceptions

These are not always reliable as hardware faults can be specific to the the way your program is configuring the device. To determine if it's a hardware (or firmware) bug vs intermittent fault you would do a combination of 1&2 and run extensive burn in tests on multiple units.

Once you have determined a hardware fault on an external IC is to blame one can often catch it in the wild with clever use of an oscilloscope/bus sniffer and proper triggering. But one needs to narrow down the culprits before this is feasible . Internal failures of an IC like the CPU are very difficult to observe directly

Answer 2

I tested my sd card using F3 and it came back with 1MB corrupt

                  SECTORS      ok/corrupted/changed/overwritten
Validating file 1.h2w ... 2097152/        0/      0/      0
Validating file 2.h2w ... 2096708/      444/      0/      0
Validating file 3.h2w ... 2097152/        0/      0/      0
Validating file 4.h2w ... 2097152/        0/      0/      0
Validating file 5.h2w ... 2097152/        0/      0/      0
Validating file 6.h2w ... 2097152/        0/      0/      0
Validating file 7.h2w ... 2097152/        0/      0/      0
Validating file 8.h2w ... 2097116/       36/      0/      0
Validating file 9.h2w ... 2096782/      370/      0/      0
Validating file 10.h2w ... 2097152/        0/      0/      0
Validating file 11.h2w ...  709024/      840/      0/      0

  Data OK: 10.34 GB (21679694 sectors)
Data LOST: 845.00 KB (1690 sectors)
           Corrupted: 845.00 KB (1690 sectors)
    Slightly changed: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors)
         Overwritten: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors)
Average reading speed: 25.12 MB/s

This seems highly likely to be the issue with my pi