Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Raspberry Pi: No boot after rpi-update

This is my first post in a long time as I was away in Brazil for a few weeks.

Anyway, when I got back I settled down to do some updating on my Pi OSes (of which I have quite a few).
I tried Raspbian first.
The command "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade" went without a hitch as did "sudo rpi-update".
That is until I tried to reboot.
It just didn't boot.
The red power light came on but the three internet lights never even flickered.
The green ACT light, however, was flashing three times, then stopping, then flashing three times and so on.
The RPi troubleshooting guide explains this nicely here.
So, it seems that start.elf was corrupted.

As usual, I'm not the first to have noticed this and a thread in the RPi forums already addressed the problem.
This post from the same thread suggests how to get Raspbian booting again.

OK, so I put my Raspbian SD card into my little, but exceedingly useful EeePC901 netbook (remember those?) and downloaded four files from the rpi-update github page.
These were bootcode.bin, start.elf, fixup.dat and kernel.img.
Then I copied all to /boot on my Raspbian SD card without doing anything further.

Back to the Pi and now the SD card booted.
Great!
Well, not quite, as for reasons I don't understand, my Logitech K260 keyboard and mouse did not work.
Same thing after a reboot.
So, now what?

Actually, the solution was quite simple.
I ssh'ed into my Pi from my MacBook (I autostart Conky in all my Pi OSes and from Conky I could see the IP) and ran "sudo rpi-update" from there.
Now, after a reboot, everything was perfect.


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