Pi 4 8GB won't boot after update (SOLVED)

Troubleshooting
1

Pi 4 8GB won’t boot after update

Exposition

Hope someone can help me recover my system as it does not appear to be booting after an update.

I have a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB running DietPi that I installed a few years ago. I’ve installed Open Media Vault and several Docker containers on it. The system was intended to be completely headless, and I’ve been able to SSH into it to run updates without issues.

The other day I was updating my Pis, which are all running DietPi, and I ran dietpi-update. The first 2 Pis updated and rebooted without any issues, and so in my infinite wisdom, I decided it was unnecessary to create a backup before updating the final NAS server. I knew something was wrong when the server didn’t come back up after 5 minutes.

I initially assumed that I had fried the micro SD card and I would have to rebuild the system. However, when I went to see if I could recover any data from the card, I discovered that the entire file system seemed to be intact. Intrigued by this discovery, I plugged it into my Debian laptop and chrooted into the drive to find that everything was where it should be.

Hopeful that I could recover everything, I ran dietpi-backup and saved the backup to a flash drive. With a fresh install of DietPi on a new SD card, I recovered that backup, and all my services came back to life! I saw a banner that recommended rebooting after the update, and so I did. The Pi did not come back on after the reboot.

To make it more confusing, I tried plugging in a monitor and setting AUTO_SETUP_HEADLESS=0 in the dietpi.txt to see if I could debug whatever was booting. The Pi lights up and appears to be running; however, no services start, and no HDMI output is displayed. My monitor seems to be picking up a signal, but the screen is blank. Now that I’m out of ideas, I’m hopeful someone here can point me in the right direction.

I have searched the existing open and closed issues

Required Information

  • DietPi version |
    G_DIETPI_VERSION_CORE=9
    G_DIETPI_VERSION_SUB=8
    G_DIETPI_VERSION_RC=0
    G_GITBRANCH=‘master’
    G_GITOWNER=‘MichaIng’
  • Distro version | bullseye 0
  • Kernel version | Linux debian 6.1.0-25-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.106-3 (2024-08-26) aarch64 GNU/Linux // Ran from chroot
  • Architecture | arm64
  • SBC model | RPi 4 Model B (aarch64)
  • Power supply used | Raspberry Pi 15W USB-C Power Supply
  • SD card used | SanDisk Extreme PLUS 64 GB

Steps to reproduce

  1. Ignore warnings and run updates without making backups
  2. Have an unknown issue happen during the update
  3. Reboot system

Expected behavior

  • System boots and starts services such as SSH and webservers

Actual behaviour

  • Pi appears to turn on, however it only displays a black image to the screen and system services do not appear to start
  • ACT LED flashes erratically indicating it may be reading the SD card then goes into a loop of quickly flashing once every 5 seconds

I’m happy to provide any output requested.

Thank you in advance for any advice and commands.

/var/tmp/dietpi/logs/dietpi-update.log (26.0 KB)

2

In a way, this is expected behavior. The parameter is called AUTO_SETUP and does exactly that. It sets a value automatically during the initial setup :wink:

To deactivate the headless mode on an RPI manually, edit the following files on first partition of the SDcard from external system:

  • In config.txt, set hdmi_ignore_hotplug=0 and comment/remove the max_framebuffers=0 line.
  • In dietpi.txt, set AUTO_SETUP_HEADLESS=0.

Hmm in the update log I see that a large number of packages are deleted.

0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 165 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 251 MB disk space will be freed.

I see, PHP, Python, Nginx, Samba, NTFS, MDADM, LVM and many more.

Did you uninstall something beforehand?

3

After editing these fields I was finally able to get an HDMI output. It seemed that all my services were actually starting as usual, except for the network manager which was not starting properly.
Using dietpi-config I was able to look at my network settings an found that my previous network configuration, where I had specified that my computer was on a static IP, wasn’t working. I switch it to DHCP and the network came back with its original IP.

Many of my system services have come back up, however OpenMediaVault seems to be having issues. I haven’t had time to completely investigate, but the admin interface is not running.

No, I don’t recall wanting to uninstall anything, but these packages look exactly like the ones OpenMediaVault would’ve used. Right now NFS, and Docker containers are working, but the interface for OMV is down.

@Joulinar Thank you for the help!

4

I had the exact same issue yesterday when trying to apply the 9.8.0 update on a Pi 5. It prompted me to do a restart at the end, after which it wasn’t able to boot up anymore. There was no network and it didn’t show up on the router anymore, so I couldn’t SSH into it. It is hooked onto a TV with Kodi, so I tried fixing it by attaching a keyboard. But it didn’t provided any HDMI output, although the TV was continuously flickering the HDMI input popup. I even removed it from that setup and connected it to my monitor, but there was no HDMI signal there either. Something popped up for less than a second occasionally, showing some text, but couldn’t catch any of that.

After more than an hour of struggling I eventually gave up, and due to lack of a backup I flashed a clean image to the SD and reinstalled, reconfigured everything from scratch.

5

I doubt it was the same. Both cases are quite different

6

Do you really mean NetworkManager as application? Because DietPi tools are using ifupdown which is conflicting with NetworkManager.

7

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