Pi3b update problems

Hello, I’ve been using a Pi3b for a while. The last time I tried to run a core update it seemed to work OK but then wouldn’t boot up, I think it was from 190 to 191. Since I was offline I just reinstalled 190 and restored my backup to get back online.
I’ve now looked at updating again since it’s getting seriously out of date; I took the precaution of cloning my sd card to a spare first then updated from 190 to 193. Everything looked fine as before until the reboot - nothing happens. I’ve got a serial console cable connected and I’m seeing nothing. Putting the spare card in, it boots up normally to 190. I’ve got the failed card in a reader here, is there something I can look at in the logs to see where it went wrong?

Hello,

I’m not sure exactly what you would need to look for, but you could look at ‘/var/log/bootlog’ and ‘/var/log/messages’ to see if anything stands out for the failed boot.

Have you tried plugging a monitor into the HDMI port on the Pi? There may be some useful information there from u-boot that you wouldn’t see on a serial console or in the logs.

Regards,
Stephen

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Right, I’ve had time do look at this more closely. I’ve mounted the SD card on my laptop and disabled the serial console so I can try and boot up with a monitor and keyboard connected, but you get nothing, just the rainbow splash screen. I’ve tried a clean install of version 190 on a spare SD card and even in a spare Pi, the update runs through and looks OK but it won’t come back up after reboot. Since I had the problem version 194 has been released, going to that instead of 193 is the same.

Out of interest I tried flashing 193 to the Pi, connecting it to the internet and updating to 194 and it works fine. So I have no idea what is broken by the upgrade from 190, and also from 189 if I remember correctly. I think I will keep a clone of my setup on a spare SD card for future updates, but having to do a clean install and restoring a backup is a bit of a pain.