Is anything plugged into USB besides a keyboard?
FYI - I found a Dell keyboard that would not allow me to boot. For fun you may want to try some other keyboard…
I have a small touchscreen that plugs in to HDMI and USB. I can try without plugging in the (USB) touchscreen. With that said, I’m really most interested in working out booting without a monitor or keyboard. This device will sit in a utility room without a monitor or keyboard connected. While I can try to get a “clean” boot with things connected, it is really only useful to do that if it helps to debug the overall issues with booting.
My IPFire RPi3B+ runs without a monitor(HDMI) and keyboard (headless!). I used the monitor(HDMI) and keyboard for Setup only and then removed both for a headless setup. I don’t need them for booting.
HDMI/Keyboard setup
This is what I see for the initialization boot on the RPI4B. The first screen goes by quick:
Then a one second pause…
and then I see LOTS of screens after that.
But it sounds like you don’t get this far…
EDIT: I can boot the RPi4B without a keyboard but it must have a monitor. I’ll try other RPi devices sometime in the next week…
Maybe an HDMI Dummy Plug (Display Emulator) might help - just a guess
I’m getting error -5 while initializing mmc card with the 8gb raspberry pi 4 over and over again works fine with manjaro linux though.
I do seem to get that far, but then goes into the loop complaining about mmc that I mentioned previously.
When you are using the monitor to boot, can you also see serial console? With a dummy monitor plug, it would be necessary to be able to get to the serial console.
In the end, the ideal situation would be a fix for the underlying issues, but I’m not sure I understand how difficult that is.
I am not sure I understand why you would need the serial console…
You can access the same info via SSH:
I was able to boot the RPi4B without the Dummy Monitor plug. I noticed the config file at /boot/config.txt include a few lines containing HDMI. After digging through the RPi config documents I found a setting that seems to work.
So I added hdmi_safe=1 and it seems to boot OK with and without a HDMI monitor.
Once booted, I can access the console via SSH.
Thanks for the info. It sounds like I can get things configured while connected to a monitor and then go from there. My primary concern with not having Serial console mode is if/when something goes wrong and the network is not functional. I had an issue recently where we had a power blip and without a network, I couldn’t troubleshoot.
That happened to me also when I had a hub/switch go bad (lighting strike).
Luckily I have a computer within 5 feet of my firewall box and I could plug direct from the computer to the green port.
With some sort of console ( monitor/keyboard or serial ) you have access to your system without networking. Also it is possible to watch the boot process.
I do not want to miss this in case of serious problems.
My latest update. I took the time/effort to set up a standard external monitor and keyboard with the goal of seeing if I could get through setup. However, it still fails part way through booting. I see @gabranth99 had a similar issue with an 8G Pi 4. Mine is with 4 gig of RAM. I’m wondering if the memory on device has something to do with this?
I ordered a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B - 4 GB RAM from Adafruit. And it arrived yesterday and it worked A-OK for me. I don’t see any of the errors above.
I’d suggest trying another SDCard or re-flashing (sorry. yes, again!)
I use these SD cards:
I also use the 16 GB cards and they work fine also.
What SD cards do you use?
from different internet searches for:
raspberry pi “error -22” whilst initializing SD card
This seems like it may be an adapter issue or might be a SD card issue. Most all of the
error -NN whilst initialising SD Card
fall into a similar solution.
1 Like
I will have to look around. Unfortunately, I think my smallest card is 32G. I have a couple of different manufacturers, but not smaller.
I should add that I’ve gotten the same failures with 32G cards from two manufacturers, so thinking maybe more about size than brand?
32 GB is fine. Any size should work but I wouldn’t recommend anything too small.
What brand?
Thus far, I’ve tried PNY and Sandisk cards. Both 32G. I have a Samsung 32G card I can try tomorrow, but kind of expecting to see the same.
Craig
This is an interesting conversation in the context of FreeBSD that talks about hardware changes related to boot issues. Not sure if applicable, but interesting nonetheless… https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=255080… especially this specific comment: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=255080#c47
I don’t really know my way around the boot process or UBoot. If there is a simple way to try another uboot for ipfire, I’d be happy to give it a try to see if that helps.
Pi 4 is picky with sdcard (or how it is formatted / partitioned), no idea why
- make sure you are not using hybrid GPT; I spent a couple days just to figure that out
- older card may not work; I have HC (32GB Toshiba) and XC (128GB Samsung EVO Plus currently in use with Pi 4 + IPFire 2.27.159), both works, but older card may not
- not sure if supported by IPFire (boot from USB, should be), but the same card you found not working may actually work if you put it in a USB reader.
Hope it helps.
… just come to my mind… perhaps you can also try dd some other distro to your sdcard and see if they work? say just dd raspbian and see if the card behave in the mmc slot?
1 Like