Hi all,
just a small anecdote of what happened to one of my Raspberries yesterday.
One Raspberry Pi 400 is running here as OBS worker for Packman build
service. It is the only one of my machines running Leap 15.6 (the others
two 8GB RAM rpi4 are running tumbleweed).
I power those off if no build jobs are waiting and only power them on
when there is work to do.
Yesterday the raspi400 failed to boot.
I investigated and found it sitting at the infamous "rainbow screen",
meaning that U-Boot did not load.
The EFI partition (vfat) was not clean, dosfsck did not help though.
It had some minor corruption (the startup.nsh file was the correct size
of 9 bytes but all NUL bytes) which I fixed - did not help.
all "config.txt", "extraconfig.txt" etc. were fine - still no boot.
I attachted the USB-attached SSD this machine uses to another spare 2GB
raspberry Pi4, where it booted just fine.
... I replaced everything in /boot/EFI with known good versions,
reinstalling all packages etc... still no boot on the rpi400, but it
always booted well on other rpi4 models.
The raspi os USB ssd from the spare 2GB rpi4 booted fine on the rpi400.
... long story short: I backed up the vfat partition of the USB ssd
(both raw block device and all files, just to be sure), mkdosfs
/dev/sdb1 (on my laptop the usb drive is sdb), doslabel EFI /dev/sdb2,
mounted the rootfs, edited fstab for the new /boot/efi UUID, remade the
initrd with dracut (forgot this at first, then the machine would not
boot waiting for the vfat partition) and now it is booting again happily
ever after.
There seems to have been some corruption in the vfat partition that
prevented the bootcode.bin from reading config.txt or such, but only on
the raspi400. (I also did update the eeprom from raspi OS, to no avail).
So if you ever are stuck at the rainbow screen, consider just remaking
the FAT partition.
I'm already mounting /boot/efi readonly on the tumbleweed machines,
because I had been seeing frequent corruption on it in the past,
probably related to premature cutting of the power on shutdown, I'll now
also do the same on Leap. I then only need to remember to remount it rw
before updating stuff like grub, u-boot,... :-)
Maybe this helps someone in the future :-)
Have fun,
seife
--
Stefan Seyfried
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard Feynman
