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.
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.