@B1bliomania: Hmm, that's... strange. I can't really see how a simple cat would fail, and some stuff obviously got unpacked since you got to see some of the stuff getting indexed...
I don't really see stuff being able to get unpacked in the wrong place, unless there's some heinous fuckery involved with the findmnt/unzip versions bundled on Mint, which sounds unlikely ^^.
Which means I'd definitely try with a brand new card, to make sure it's not simply a bad coincidence with a dying card
.
(I will be adding another set of sanity checks post-install to the script, though ^^).