Raspbian Dist-upgrade bricks rpi3

[citizen]

just went through this process three times on multiple RPi3's with the same result.

Fresh memory card, install the image and boots fine. Perform a sudo update, dist-upgrade and on reboot the screen blinks with a single cursor, and my green light blinks regularly.

Just wondering if anyone else has noticed this lately.

Best,

[DirkS]

Expanded the filesystem?

[Rive]

I don't use dist-upgrade myself because it has a tendency to break things on my Pi3.

once or so a week I do this:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

[citizen]

Expanding the file system did the trick.

I must've left this off my checklist for things to do with a new pi. Guess that's why they call it Noobs.

[Douglas6]

Probably not expanding the file system, as DirkS says. By thy way, corrupting or maxing out the SD card is not 'bricking the Pi'.

[MarkHaysHarris777]

Probably not expanding the file system, as DirkS says. By thy way, corrupting or maxing out the SD card is not 'bricking the Pi'.

No kidding. ... caught my eye ... to me 'brick the PI' means the firmware in the GPU has been trashed (and cannot be restored)!

[PlanB]

The blinking light mention in the 1st post of this thread caught my eye. On my previous PIs the wheezy sd card showed little or no activity on the green led when no programs were running but the same card in the PI3 pulses the green led at ~2Hz. How could I find out what is causing this?

[dgordon42]

The green LED on a Pi 3B is different than the ones on earlier models. It is an activity indicator, and it's normal for it to flash on about once per second. In addition, other things (SD card access & WiFi activity possibly) also make it flash. After shutdown it remains in a steady 'on' state, unlike earlier models, although I believe this behavior may change with future software updates.
This is the case of you are running Raspbian Jessie, not sure about NOBBS.

Hope this helps,
Dave.

[PlanB]

Thnx dave, so it's probably not wearing out my sd card then with ~7200 accesses/hr in wheezy either?

[stderr]

Thnx dave, so it's probably not wearing out my sd card then with ~7200 accesses/hr in wheezy either?

The more often you are writing to the sdcard, the more likely that on that one weird time you lose power, the two activities will occur at the same time. I'm not sure what you could be writing that often, but if it is output from security cameras or data from your bird feeder or something like that, you could collect that together for a time on a ram disk and then write that larger amount much less often to the flash drive. You probably should also consider separating the sdcard boot and root of your linux system and its data storage location by putting the data on at least a different flash device. I would also argue for having a third one just for swap, if you are using that.