I installed the GrovePi software on my RPi2. It no longer boots to the desktop, but sticks with a blinking cursor. This is after all of the log messages scroll by so a lot is happening. The install seemed to go smoothly and it auto rebooted. I am not sure how to boot to a mode that will allow me to repair. There is material on the flash that I would like to retrieve.
Along the path of making progress I will attempt to build another flash with the Dexter Raspian
For sake of clarity, I did install a gpio library for an earlier project, which was working fine. It seems that this would be potentially related, but seems like a strange place for the boot to fail.
It does not matter if the GrovePi+ is installed or not…
Hey chucko,
Are you able to get the SSH access to the Raspberry Pi and is the problem there without the GrovePi connected too?
-Karan
Aargh… Yes I can connect, but the password fails … I did not change the password (knowingly, and I am familiar with the process and danagers on linux) and the image has never responded to the default passwd… methinks I am hosed
OK, with the help of a software crowbar and some brute force I reset the password and am able to log in via ssh.
The problem is the same with or without the Grove installed.
With another image I built, I was able to run the blink led demo. I would like to unwedge this card if possible.
Hey chucko,
Sorry, I’m trying to keep pace with the conversation. By “unwedge” are you still locked out of the card you’re trying to get onto?
Also, it’s unclear (to me at least) what software you installed that led to the crash . . . did you just do a git pull, did you install python, did you run the firmware update?
Thanks for the clarity. This sounds like a really severe problem we’d like to get to the bottom of. I’m not sure how this install could be affecting your Pi, but we’d like to understand more.
Thanks!
John
I had a fairly basic noob card out of an RPi 2 kit (canakit). I had done a few trial projects including catching a button press on a jumpered up protoboard using python and nodejs. Things had been working well. I had installed a couple of other libraries related to the gpio for that, but nothing I am aware of that does a configure on the way up. I followed the instructions for installing GrovePi+ (which I think was around the BrickPi, as I recall)… the install seemed to go normally. At then end I think that there was an autoreboot. At that point it failed to boot to “desktop” mode… which had never been a problem before.
I have managed to get into the ssh path and I am able to run some of my existing code, etc. I ran raspi-config and managed to change to boot to a prompt and that seems to work fine. The problem seems to occur when booting to startx. I suppose something got setup in the init for startx prior to the reboot that just presented upon the reboot, but I can’t think what that would be. It does not seem like the GrovePi software would need to make changes to the windows interface, but I really am not familiar.
Any suggestions as to where to look would be appreciated. Fortunately this is all experimentation at this point. I have built up a secondary flash to make progress and now have a second RPi2 for experimentation. I will try to reinstall in the next couple of days on that and see if the results are different.
I think that I tracked down the issue… I appear to have run out of space on the system flash around the time of the GrovePi install. I am not sure if the install completed successfully or not, but it did auto reboot at the end which I assume indicates success.
Is it safe to reinstall without uninstalling?
Anyway after some clean up I am able to start up startx successfully.
Thanks, C
Hey,
I think the space getting exhausted might be the root cause of the problem. The Pi does behave weirdly when it has no space left. It would be better if you made sure that you had plenty of space left and with a bigger SD card don’t forget to expand the SD card with raspi-config.
I think it would be safe to reinstall it without uninstalling but the space running out might have caused an error in the first place. It would be better to start with a fresh SD card which has a lot of free space left.
-Karan
Yeah, space is key. I had installed another unrelated package that when built used up 3GB. I had not realized how much space had vanished. Doh.
I think we can close this out for now. Thanks