Raspberry pi 3 boot issue

Question

Hey guys!

Having an issue with my Pi 3. It was working 100% fine as usual at night, but the next morning when I turned it on, I got " no signal " on my TV...... bloody strange. The red light is on solid, and the green light is flashing sporadically. Nothing happened to it overnight, it wasn't dropped, knocked or anything..... just literally decided not to work the next day.

Anyone ran into this?

Thanks in advance.

Aaron

rctho · Answer

Turn on the tv before powering the pi. if there is no video device connected during startup it won't load the video drivers. make sure the input on your television is correct too. I hope that helps.

mp2100 · Answer

How long have you been running the rPi? SD cards do wear out. They don’t have the long read/write life of other forms of memory. But an SD card should last a year or two. It doesn’t help you today, but the rPi 3 (not earlier models) will boot and run from a USB drive. https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/msd.md

bwelsby · Answer

Have you got a spare uSD you can install raspbian on and see if that works. Do you "shutdown" the Pi before removing power?

jomoenginer · Answer

Can you capture the blinky pattern for the Green LED? If it is blinking, then it is an indication that the SD card is being accessed. See the following link to see if the pattern you see matches one listed. https://elinux.org/R-Pi_Troubleshooting Also, if you have a FTDI-USB cable, you can get a Serial console to the Pi and look at the boot process and see if anything there leads to an issue. https://elinux.org/RPi_Serial_Connection

rew · Answer

jomoenginer wrote:

but this is only if there is free space left on the memory device.

Keep in mind that this is another "free" than what you'd see with "df", or in "6.4Gb used of 8Gb" in your file browser.

When an SD card claims 8Gb, they actually mean 8 billion bytes. But in physical computer stuff that would normally be 8 * 2^30, which is a few percent more (about 7.2% if my wet-ware-calculator is correct). That 7% is used for wear leveling. So... worst-case you write the full 8Gb of data, and then start writing a single block of data again and again. Now all-but-one blocks are "in use" and your rewritten block will be written in the next-available block in the (7%*8GB=) 570Mb of "secret space". Now if we assume that the SD card works with 128kB blocks, you'll have written that single block 4600 times before the first datablock is getting written for the second time.....

Every time you write to a DIFFERENT block, it will get a block from the pool of free blocks and then the old one will get added to the pool.

ripntime · Answer

Maybe corrupted file system to many bad shutdowns over time has corrupted boot files possibly. Best next solution is to start fresh, but if you have files on the micro-sd you want to keep get a micro-sd to SD adapter and load it in a laptop and take the files you want to keep. There is the chance that when you try to access it on the laptop it'll say it's corrupt you can try fixing it but that will put a lot of stress on the card ad might bring t closer to failure than just a format and reinstall would do. Sincerely Christopher

ripntime · Answer

Sometimes it's time vs money and the money for an sd card vs loosing hair is not worth it in the long run. Plus it could have bad sectors which will produce intermittent problems on a Pi.
A fresh start leaves nothing to chance. The old one can be used for release testing or for trying various Pi systems retropie etc.

jomoenginer · Answer

With Flash memory and SSD, the location where data was written previously may not be the same place it is on the memory device due to wear leveling. There is an attempt to remap the blocks in storage and mark an area that had a write error as bad, but this is only if there is free space left on the memory device. The fun thing with flash Memory cards and SSDs is that unless the device supports SMART features and they are enable, you will not know the memory device is bad until it no longer works and you can not get to any of the data. This is why it's good to not put anything important on a flash base storage device or ensure it is backed up often.