Thanx for the hint on debsums - that eases the search for problems a lot. Just pimped my test script with a call to it, so it now collects the files reported by debsums as well. Will take tests with it tomorrow.ext4 does not checksum user data, so fsck will only notice a problem if corruption happens to land in the ~1.6% of blocks that store metadata.The fschk is always ok, and I also test selective files for their content and they are ok
You can install package debsums and run sudo debsums -ca to check all files that belong to packages. Or sudo debsums -ca -r /mnt/rootfs from another Debian-based system with the card mounted. (It is normal for a few files in /etc/ not to match, where Raspberry Pi have changed a configuration without taking full control of the package from Debian.)
It might be useful to know whether the corruption happens or gets worse on the first boot, or is all present immediately after imaging.
Statistics: Posted by cla — Wed Jan 28, 2026 9:36 pm