RISC OS freezing after it gets to desktop

Hi there,

RISC OS. Ah, the sheer joy of being able to return to the halcyon days of my youth... How I remember those hours spent in the school IT lab programming in BBC Basic on a Model A and B, or at home on my Spectrum, QL, Amstrad et al.

I never did manage to get an Archimedes, but I followed it closely in the computing press. Only fitting therefore that RISC OS should be the first OS I booted up on my new Pi. Alas, all is not plain sailing...

As mentioned, I've just received my 512Mb Pi. Before powering it on, I downloaded and installed the official RIS OS image from the raspberrypi.org downloads page, and transferred it scuccessfully to a 4Gb SSD (via OS X terminal command line). I also popped it into a PiBow case for good measure

So far so good. Booting up RISC OS seems fine. I do get the No Keyboard Found error but I have read elsewhere on these forums that this is a legacy of not finding a PS/2 keyboard.

Bootup finishes fine and I end up on the desktop. I am able to move the mouse about for about 10 seconds and then it freezes indefinitely. The desktop image stays solid, but no input seems to be recognised.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Setup
RaspPi 512 Mb
4GB no-brand old SSD. Possibly the issue?
Micrsoft USB wheel mouse (not sure which version exactly, but quite a basic one)
A4 tech keyboard from E14/Farnell
Power supply from E14/Farnell
HDMI cable off ebay (gold plated - seems fine, picture is rock solid)

Thanks in advance!

bit of a random thought that may not be relevant: I have been hapily using riscos for a while but had similar problems the other day. My problems began when I started mucking around with battery packs. My assumption is that the batteries ran out during boot causing the SD card to become corrupted. The symptoms I experienced were similar to yours. I solved them by re-formatting and re-imaging the card.

Does that solve your problem? could it be caused by a power failure corrupting the card?

Thanks for the reply. I'll have a go and let you know.

I also have a 2GB Kingston SD card which I'll try. Might be better quality.

If neither works I'll order an official one off the open RISC OS site

Bricked it again whilst mucking about with the GPIO - again solved the problem by re-imaging the SD.

I am able to move the mouse about for about 10 seconds and then it freezes indefinitely. The desktop image stays solid, but no input seems to be recognised.

Also no keyboard entries possible?

4GB no-brand old SSD. Possibly the issue?

I only use el cheapo class 4 SDHC cards. Reading through the forum, I conclude expensive/fast cards do not have any advantages over those. If RISC OS doesn't find the card, it should request it, as far as I understand this OS. Might be wrong.

In case of USB trouble: You could try connecting your devices to a powered USB hub. You could also restrict the Pi's hub to USB 1.1 in case mouse and keyboard use different protocols.

Have you tried re-downloading the image and flashing it again the problems that you are have may be down to a bad image file.
also try flashing on a spit spit window machine wash my mouth out with soap spit spit.

Thanks everyone.

I re-imaged the SD card but got the same issue: desktop OK, but no mouse or keyboard input possible. Netsurf crashes and then I get the following error:

Internal Error: abort on data transfer at FC016374

Looks like it could well be the card. I'll buy a new one as my other 2GB card is not even being picked up by the Mac! Must be really old

I bought an 8GB class 10 from Maplin today and had no issues getting Wheezy running, so it's not the Pi.

I'll update again when I have (hopefully) better news.

If it freezes, do you find the ethernet lights go off? This is a symptom of power problems, or USB trouble. Have you tried measuring the voltage between TP1 and TP2?

I had exactly the same problem - it was all down to a the mouse I was trying to use. It didn't matter whether it was directly plugged in, or via a powered hub, it always managed to freeze the machine after a few seconds. Changing the mouse solved the problem completely.

In my case this issue was resolved by changing from a Microsoft mouse to some other random mouse I happened to have laying around.

Looks like there is something not satandard (what a surprise *G*) with MS mice...

I've just realised that I never got back to you on how things went.

I've tried 3 different SD cards (2x 4GB and 1x 2GB) and had the same problem as before.*

I gave up on RISC OS after the third attempt, but now I see that it could be mouse related, and I was indeed using an MS mouse. I think that I have a no-brand one lying about somewhere, if not there is a Maplin almost underneath our office and I'll go pick one up there.

Thank you for the continued advice. I'll come back (hopefully a bit more quickly this time) and let you know if that worked.

*Interestingly, all 3 would only format to FAT16. Is this a limitation of SD cards with a capacity of 4GB or less?

*Interestingly, all 3 would only format to FAT16. Is this a limitation of SD cards with a capacity of 4GB or less?

No it is a limit of what ever OS you used to partition and format them.
Also normal FAT 16 only supports up to just under 2GB. Maximum cluster size 32768 (signed 16-bit) maximum clusters per partition 65520 (the last 16 values do not pint to clusters thpough have special meaning) 32768 * 65520 = 2146959360 (1MB less than 2GB)

There are only two OSes that I know of that suport FAT 16+ this uses unsigned cluster sizes and thus supports up to 65536 byte clusters, and 65536 * 65520 = 4293918720 (1MB less than 4GB). The two OSes are DR-DOS 7.03 Enhanced and FreeDOS 1.1.

I'm using OS X. Could be an issue there perhaps.

Re FAT restriction being at 2GB, I might have got the 4GB card's format wrong in my head in that case. I'll check tomorrow when I retry getting this to work.

Thanks for the info.

I use Disk Utility on a mac running either SL 10.6.8 or Lion 10.7.5 to partition SD cards without any problems, then use Terminal to "dd" the image to a SD card. I've done up to 64 Gb SDXC ok so far (but not for RPi of course)

If you detail your procedure maybe we could help?

Hi tvjon

It's not the card as I don't have any problems actually creating bootable images although I thought it was that initially. No, it's the mouse, as others have pointed out. Yes, I have finally had sucess! I swapped my nice shiny MS mouse for my wife's cruddy Dell one, and all is well - I can zip around the desktop and open apps, write a bit of goold old BBC BASIC (sigh of joy) etc.

Now, onto the next problem: enabling networking kills my Pi again. When I followed the instructions in Welcome.html and rebooted, the desktop came back up but the hourglass just sits immutably in the centre of the screen - no keyboard or mouse input is possible... I'll scan these forums to see if there is a fix for that particular problem.

Hey ho, I will get there in the end!

On a side note, I also bought myself a USB stick with RISC OS 5 and the RPC emulator to run on OS X. Very nice too. But I'd rather run natively on the Pi. It just feels more 'right' somehow.

Hah!

It turns out that a good old "switch it off and on again" works in this case!

Thanks for all your help everyone, much appreciated. I now intend to teach my youngest daughter how to code with BBC BASIC. She already likes Scratch on the Mac so I might just get her hooked...