Unreachable fresh image

Troubleshooting
1

I’m using a RPi4B, fresh install.

Issue I’m having is that the device becomes inaccessible shortly after boot.

I’m very familiar with dietpi, having used it on my orange pi devices for awhile.

Dug out a raspberry pi 4 B, the issue is that shortly after performing the config after first signin, it becomes inaccessible.

I’m using the official Canakit 5V power supply (actually tried two of them, in case one was going bad).

I just switched to a new microsd card, a Samsung EVO Select, U3, A2, V30 - same specs as the official raspberry pi micro sd so it shouldn’t be a problem. I’d also tried several other cards, including one that worked just find in an orange pi, just didn’t need anymore since I’m booting from an ssd now.

The issue is that I reimage the sd card, set my passwords, update, select the packages I want (just tigervnc server and a desktop environment) and then it becomes inaccessible after 30 minutes or so.

I can hear the fan whirring but it doesn’t even show up on the network. The ethernet cord is definitely good, switched the cords I’ve been using for my main orangepi and it works great with the orangepi.

I more recently tried while plugged into a monitor instead of my usual headless setup. Went exactly the same way, although now I can see that when it boots up, it gets to the signin page but right after it says ‘press return to sign in’ the screen goes blank and I just see a blinking ‘_’ symbol in the upper left hand corner. I’m assuming this is the issue.

I used to have an external hdd plugged in but for troubleshooting, recently I’ve had nothing plugged in but the monitor, keyboard, and power supply.

I used the integrated stress tester to test the cpu and ram for 5 minutes, no issues.

I’ve been an IT guy for the last half decade so I’ve tried pretty much all the troubleshooting I can think of but I’m kind of dead in the water here. Thoughts?

2

Did you enabled some kind of autostart? At least it sound’s like. Otherwise it should stay on the login screen.

3

Only thing I can think of is setting the autologin, which might have triggered that symptom but isn’t related to the issue I’ve been having.

Thinking of flashing Raspbian or whatever it’s called and seeing if the issue continues.

I reflashed it today and it wasn’t pingable, didn’t even show up on the router, so a fresh image isn’t doing anything. I don’t have it connected to a monitor since my networking cluster is off by the router, would have to dig out a monitor and observe it.

Originally I thought it was an issue with the desktop environment, on my orange pi I installed gnome and had issues with hibernation before I masked the targets for that, sleep, and a couple other things.

In recent tests I’ve stuck with basic desktop environments such as xfce and mate, downloaded from dietpi-software just in case.

Maybe a hardware issue? It seemed to be getting more frequent. I ran a jellyfin server months ago on it and I noticed that while I was still able to view videos while on different devices, I wasn’t able to VNC or SSH in sometimes, although that would pass. Then eventually the jellyfin too failed.

This all occurred on different networks.

Pi specific issue maybe? Maybe it’s not dietpi specific but if there’s tricks I can try to determine if there’s some sort of hardware/whatever fault I’d greatly appreciate it, I’ve been going mad trying to dial in on what exactly is causing this, even switching out everything but the pi itself

4

A monitor would be useful to see exactly what happens during boot-up. Anything else would be mere speculation.

5

The pi has to have either a damaged ethernet port or the router has to have an issue with ethernet.

I’ve been running it off wifi which I don’t love, but it’s able to output two jellyfin streams at the same time which is pretty much all I require of it.

As much as I hate on the TP-Link router, I’m suspecting it’s the Pi hardware mainly because I saw similar issues when plugging the Pi into a Gl.inet router via ethernet. Different cords and ports saw the same issue. Not grand, I try to run all servers off ethernet, but glad it’s back to a useable state.

I’m running Pi OS on it now, flashed it for troubleshooting purposes and it’s been working for the last several days. Will probably put Dietpi on it again at some point just to be sure that it’s the ethernet port or something like that, as it’s my preferred OS

6

It started again, same issue - I’m now thinking again that this is a ram issue. Picking up a pi 5 since the orange pi’s have gotten to be crazy prices (the 5 plus I bought a little more than a year ago has gone from $152 to $280, crazy) so we’ll see how it goes. Probably going to order a ram kit to solder on this problematic unit, might as well fix it while getting to something more reasonable than 4 gb. Will update

7

Just as side note, I checked the installation on a spare RPi4B without issues. Download the image and flashed it to SD card using Rufus.