Got a couple rpi 3Bs I’d like to use headless.

Downloaded 32bit pi os lite, flashed it to an sd card, powered on and did the initial setup (select keyboard layout, set first user+pass).

As soon as I’m dropped into a shell, I run ‘sudo apt update’ then ‘sudo apt upgrade -y’.

Once these finish, I type ‘sudo reboot’; the pi reboots, shows the rainbow splash, about a dozen lines of kernal boot messages then the video output dies and after a couple seconds the act light stops flashing too. Disconnecting power and powering it again does the same thing.

I don’t think it’s hardware failure as I get the same results with both 3Bs and with a 4B.

I don’t know what to do from here.

I’ve spent the last 6 hours retrying this with both the 32 and 64 bit versions of pi os light. I can’t get past the initial update/upgrade.

Anyone got any ideas? Anyone got a spare sd card, a pi 3B, and some free time to see if I’m just stupid somehow? I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong.

/edit: RESULTS!

I can only assume this was a bad sd card. Tried a different card, with the exact same procedure: it finally booted after an upgrade.

Ran the update/upgrade again + a dist-upgrade and a couple more reboots. Up and running.

Excuse me while I go grab an image of that working card to file away.

  • @just_another_personEnglish
    5•2 days ago
    1. What are the kernel messages that you are saying?
    2. Have you checked to see if the board is is still active via network?
    3. Have you tested with a different SD Card?
      • @just_another_personEnglish
        5•2 days ago

        SD cards get thrashed pretty quickly from high I/O usage. Install and setup log2ram to mitigate some of that issue, and put any heavy logging to wherever you set the log2ram mount (/var/log by default). Note this will extend the life of the SD card, but reduce your available RAM while running. Another option is getting an NVME hat or USB adapter to not run on off of SD.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•2 days ago

      Here’s a couple frames from a video I took. More lines than I thought, but I don’t see anything noteworthy :/

      Start of boot:

      Last lines shown before video dies:

      • @just_another_personEnglish
        2•2 days ago

        Pretty sure the video mode is just being set wrong. Did you set the run level or something since you mentioned headless? Have you tried to SSH into it?

        What happens if you boot the clean image, then reboot it without updating?

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•2 days ago

      1. didn’t look like anything unusual, but I’ll try and grab a photo before it disappears from screen. Waiting on ‘apt upgrade’ rn.

      2. the devices MAC has a fixed DHCP lease. The IP becomes and remains unreachable as soon as I enter ‘sudo reboot’.

      3. this is a previously known to be good card (it had a working OS on it prior to todays messing around), but I’ll try another for good measure.

      • @DeckweissEnglish
        2•2 days ago

        Grab the sd card, and look at it on your pc. If windows can’t read it (idk anything about windows), do so from another linux (live boot Ubuntu or something on your windows machine).

        The journal log should be stored at either one of:

        /var/log/journal/<machine-id>/*.journal

        /run/log/journal/<machine-id>/*.journal

        Post it’s contents in full here via pastebin.com