Installation on Rasberry Pi 4B fails

Hardware
1

Hi everyone,
I am trying to install ipfire on a Rasberry and no matter what I do I always get a rainbow monitor after flashing the SD card…

What have I tried so far?

  1. I downloaded the latest Ipfire image aarch64 both as an ISO image and as a flash image from the site and checked the SHA256 hash value.
  2. I have flashed the images to the SD card and also to USB sticks, I have done this with Rasberry Imager, with baleneaEtcher and via the terminal/console, I have tried this from different computers, with a Mac and a Linux system. I also changed the uEnv file from SERIAL-CONSOLE=ON to SERIAL-CONSOLE=OFF.
  3. I installed a Rasberry Linux OS on the SD card to see if the Rasberry hardware would work, this worked fine. I also checked and updated the Rasberry’s boot manager in the same way.
  4. What hardware and software did I use?
    Rasberry PI4B 8GB Ram.
    An original Rasberry power supply, an Apple MacBook Pro USB-C power supply 75 Watt.
    Two different ScanDisk UHS-3 (U3) SD cards, one 32GB and one 64GB.
    ScanDisk USB3 stick 64GB
    ipfire-2.29-core192-aarch64.iso, ipfire-2.27.2gb-ext4.aarch64-full-core163.img.xz, ipfire-2.27.2gb-ext4.aarch64-full-core163.img.xz

But no matter what I do, the result is always the same: a rainbow monitor and the LEDs on the Rasberry light up red and the green one flashes twice.

2

You mention making changes to the uEnv file bot not any changes to the boot.cmd file as mentioned in the IPFire documentation.

https://www.ipfire.org/docs/hardware/arm/rpi/four

Did you also make the changes in boot.cmd mentioned in the linked forum post in the documentation?

3

did you try this?

Screenshot 2025-03-19 at 1.40.17 PM
Screenshot 2025-03-19 at 1.40.17 PM1872×776 84.8 KB

in this area:
https://www.ipfire.org/docs/hardware/arm/rpi/four#troubleshooting

1 Like
4

@Adolf Belka, I have changed it so unfortunately it has not brought any change.
@Jon, I have added hdmi_safe=0 to the config.txt now the rainbow screen is gone it is booting from the SD card, but now I get the error messages in the boot process:
mmc1: error -22 whilist initialising SD card
and
mmc1: invalid bus widh
I have also tried this with and without the changes that Adolf Belka suggested

5

If I remember correctly, this could be a few different things.

Have you loaded raspberry pi OS? Does that work? And do you know the board PCB Revision?

Screenshot 2025-03-19 at 3.05.32 PM
Screenshot 2025-03-19 at 3.05.32 PM1604×706 61.1 KB

At the beginning of the wiki page Adolf recommended, there are Raspberry Pi PCB Revision that causes issues. I only have Revision 1.1 and 1.2 boards so I haven’t seen this issue.

Search:
https://community.ipfire.org/search?q=whilst%20initialising%20SD%20order%3Alatest

and look for your error -22

EDIT:

Load up the the Raspberry software and find your PCB Revision

EDIT2: this might help.

6

Hello,

I noticed that for the current core, you have only tried the iso. Have you tried flashing ipfire-2.29-core192-aarch64.img.xz to a micro SD card and booting that way?

Regards,
Stephen

1 Like
7

Hello,

one of my rpi 4b runs core 190 on eeprom wich was available in november 2024.
The other one runs core 192 on Rev 1.4 stable.
I only changed serial to OFF and hdmi_safe=1 and never saw rainbows.
Used hdmi-connector next to usb-c-power connector. The other hdmi-connector does show nonsense.

For years I used a sandisk stick in upper black connector.
Now I got a new one (sandisk ultrafit 64 GB) and found out this stick needs to be put into one of the blue connectors because it’s an usb-3-stick.

What else did you connect? RPI 4 needs lots of power if you use usb-lan-converters.

Good luck.

8

@jon The board is a 4B revision 1.5 d03115. I will also try the approach described in the link to adapt the boot.scr so far I have only adapted the boot.cmd.
@stephen the version is wrong in my software description i also used it with the ipfire-2.29-core192-aarch64.img.xz
@firecherry at the moment nothing is connected to the Rasberry except a keyboard, I use a power supply from a MacBook Pro, which should have enough power even in the worst case :wink:

9

I have still no newer rpi4 boards but other user have reported that since core192 also the newer boards boot without changes.

Have you checked your power supply?.

Have you flashed the latest firmware from the Raspberry Pi foundation?

To find a good mmc card for RPi4 is not easy. Often it is better to boot from an usb device. (But this may need a firmware update flashed on the RPi4)

The mentioned changes to boot.scr should do the same as erasing it because it create an syntax error that result in not loading the kernel/initrd and falls back to grub boot. In this fallback mode not all hardware is supported because a stripped down device tree is used. (No temp sensors, no cpufreq support).

10

I’ve had a few issues with power supplies. In the beginning I did use an Apple power source with a raspberry pi had issues (to be fair this was 6-7 years ago and things change).

I changed to the “official” raspberry pi supply and that got things to work.

IMG_4274
IMG_4274480×640 374 KB

11

Thank you very much for your help…
The problem is solved, after spending about 20 hours flashing SD cards and USB sticks, trying your tips and reading through many posts, I have given up trying Ipfire on my Rasberry Pi 4b 8GB revision 1.5 d03115, my lifetime is too good for that :wink:
So I reached into my shelf and took out an Apple Mac mini 2011, downloaded the image for x86_64 from the ipfire website, flashed it to a USB stick with balenaEtcher as it was without any further adjustments, plugged the USB stick into the Mac and started installing Ipfire.
The whole process took an hour, I can now access the WEB interface and configure the firewall.

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