# Forcing an update failure

**URL:** <https://hub.mender.io/t/forcing-an-update-failure/766>\
**Category:** General Discussions\
**Created:** [June 30, 2019, 12:02pm UTC](https://hub.mender.io/t/forcing-an-update-failure/766 "2019-06-30T12:02:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![tmrskos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c68b51/32.png) [@tmrskos](https://hub.mender.io/u/tmrskos)\
**Post date:** [June 30, 2019, 12:02pm UTC](https://hub.mender.io/t/forcing-an-update-failure/766/1 "2019-06-30T12:02:40Z")

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Hello,

I noticed a similar post here, but mine is a little different.

I’m using the hosted mender service with a Pi. I would like to demo a rollback in the event that a failed deployment to a Pi device. Is there something I can do to a new deployment to force it to fail and roll back to the original partition? Maybe a one-line config change or deleting a file from an image that is required. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

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**Author:** ![mirzak](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/hub.mender.io/mirzak/32/2056_2.png) [@mirzak](https://hub.mender.io/u/mirzak)\
**Post date:** [July 1, 2019, 7:17am UTC](https://hub.mender.io/t/forcing-an-update-failure/766/2 "2019-07-01T07:17:22Z")

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There are a couple of ways of doing this and what I typically do is to create an Mender Artifact that has bogus payload data.

E.g

```auto
dd if=/dev/zero of=tmp.data bs=1M count=1
mender-artifact write rootfs-image -f tmp.data --device-type raspberrypi3 --artifact-name "bad-artifact"

```

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![tmrskos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c68b51/32.png) [@tmrskos](https://hub.mender.io/u/tmrskos)\
**Post date:** [July 1, 2019, 10:29am UTC](https://hub.mender.io/t/forcing-an-update-failure/766/3 "2019-07-01T10:29:15Z")

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Thanks much, that update did the trick! I was able to force a failure to demo Mender’s rollback.

One follow up question. I’m on a Mac and getting an error when trying to use the mender-artifact to read out a file: mender-artifact cat test.mender:/etc/hosts  
failed to copy from: test.mender:/etc/hosts to stdout: err: extFile: ReadError: debugfsCopyFile failed: debugfs: run debugfs dump: exec: “debugfs”: executable file not found in $PATH

Any thoughts?

Thanks again!