Trouble updating original Pi to latest Raspbian

[Madeye]

Hi all,

I have an original Raspberry Pi (hardware details below) that has been running the music in my kitchen for the last 3 years plus. Now I want to upgrade it to Raspbian Jessie. So I:

1) Burned the Jessie image onto an 8gb MicroSD card
2) Copied the file back to hard drive and verified the checksum
3) Put the SD card into a full-size adapter and tried to boot the Pi
4) Pi failed to boot - red light came on but no other lights suggesting it can't make sense of card
5) Backed up original working OS from 4Gb full size SD card to hard drive
6) Burned the Jessie image onto the original 4Gb full size SD card
7) Copied the file back to hard drive and verified the checksum
8) Tried to boot the Pi
9) Pi failed to boot - red light came on but no other lights suggesting it can't make sense of card
10) Burned the original working OS back onto the full size 4Gb SD card
11) Tried to boot the Pi
12) Pi booted up just fine (PHEW!)
13) As an experiment I then burned the original OS onto the 8gb MicroSD, checked checksum then attempted to boot - still no dice

As I have verified the checksum on the burns I can rule out problems with the memory card or reader. Also, the 4Gb card works just fine with the right image on it (the original backup).

So, from this empirical evidence I'd make the following observations:

1) Raspbian Jessie is not compatible with the original Raspberry Pis
2) One of the following doesn't work for original Pis: cards over 4Gb or MicroSD mounted in an adapter

However, from what I read none of these things should be true.

Am I doing something wrong or have I hit some kind of limitation? Any help or advice warmly welcomed.

Kind regards,
Matt

Hardware details
Hardware : BCM2708
Revision : 0002
Serial : 00000000a15dd8bc

[klricks]

I just put my SD card with Raspbian Jessie Pixel from my RPi 3B into my old Model B (2011) and it booted fine.
What did you use to write your images?
What do you mean by "verified the checksum" The RPF does not provide checksum (SHA) for the uncompressed (unzipped) image so it must be something you generated?????

[HawaiianPi]

Hi all,

I have an original Raspberry Pi (hardware details below) that has been running the music in my kitchen for the last 3 years plus. Now I want to upgrade it to Raspbian Jessie. So I:

1) Burned the Jessie image onto an 8gb MicroSD card
2) Copied the file back to hard drive and verified the checksum

What do you mean by this?

What were the steps you took when you "Burned the Jessie image onto an 8gb MicroSD card"?

And what did you copy back to the hard drive to verify the checksum?

5) Backed up original working OS from 4Gb full size SD card to hard drive

How did you back this up?

6) Burned the Jessie image onto the original 4Gb full size SD card
7) Copied the file back to hard drive and verified the checksum

Again, those two statements make no sense to me. When you write an image to an SD card it creates partitions and many files. If you are just copying the image file to the SD card then you are doing it wrong.

As I have verified the checksum on the burns I can rule out problems with the memory card or reader. Also, the 4Gb card works just fine with the right image on it (the original backup).

So, from this empirical evidence I'd make the following observations:

1) Raspbian Jessie is not compatible with the original Raspberry Pis

Not true as far as I know, but I can dig up my old PiB and verify that for you if you'd like.

2) One of the following doesn't work for original Pis: cards over 4Gb or MicroSD mounted in an adapter

This also should not be true... However, there have been issues with some Pi computers and certain SD cards, so you might have run into one of those uncommon incompatibilities.

So now you are probably wondering why the new image didn't work with your old SD card? Well, if it was the full version with the Pixel desktop, I'm pretty sure it decompresses to more than 4GB, so that old card is too small.

Or, based on the confusing statements above, it could just be how you are imaging the cards.

[rpdom]

1) Raspbian Jessie is not compatible with the original Raspberry Pis

Not true as far as I know, but I can dig up my old PiB and verify that for you if you'd like.

I have run the latest Raspbian images on an original PiB with no problems

[hxmuller]

Larger cards are not a problem, if you don't expand the filesystem on the image before inserting it into the PI and booting, it will automatically expand on the first boot.

As you are able to burn the image to the 8GB micro SD card with the adapter, you can assume the micro SD and adapter connections are not the problem. Can you view the contents of the boot/ partition on the micro SD card from the computer you burned the image with? If not, your image burning process may be the culprit. If you can, then it is possible your micro SD card is the culprit, and it just won't boot.

[Madeye]

Many thanks for the replies - sorry for my slow response, I've been away

Looking at the replies, I've obviously glossed over some of the details of what I actually did, making it hard for anyone to offer advice (sorry!). So, in more detail here are the steps I followed (annotated). I am running Fedora 21 Linux on my desktop. My MicroSD card device is /dev/sdf and my full-size SD card device is /dev/sde. The Jessie image I downloaded from the Raspbian site is saved as jessie.img. The SHA1 checksum for this file is listed as e0eeb96e2fa10b3bd4b57454317b06f5d3d09d46 on the Raspbian site.

# 1) Burned the Jessie image onto an 8gb MicroSD card
dd bs=4M if=jessie.img of=/dev/sdf

# 2) Copied the file back to hard drive and verified the checksum
dd bs=4M if=/dev/sdf of=jessie-from-sd.img
sha1sum jessie-from-sd.img
=> e0eeb96e2fa10b3bd4b57454317b06f5d3d09d46

# 3) Put the SD card into a full-size adapter and tried to boot the Pi
# 4) Pi failed to boot - red light came on but no other lights suggesting it can't make sense of card

# 5) Backed up original working OS from 4Gb full size SD card to hard drive
dd bs=4M if=/dev/sde of=original-os.img
sha1sum original-os.img
=> b3c2e85e91636a05de49a5a67ead29b810d5d6d9

# 6) Burned the Jessie image onto the original 4Gb full size SD card
dd bs=4M if=jessie.img of=/dev/sde

# 7) Copied the file back to hard drive and verified the checksum
dd bs=4M if=/dev/sde of=jessie-from-sd.img
sha1sum jessie-from-sd.img
=> e0eeb96e2fa10b3bd4b57454317b06f5d3d09d46

# 8) Tried to boot the Pi
# 9) Pi failed to boot - red light came on but no other lights suggesting it can't make sense of card

# 10) Burned the original working OS back onto the full size 4Gb SD card
dd bs=4M if=original-os.img of=/dev/sde

# 11) Tried to boot the Pi
# 12) Pi booted up just fine (PHEW!)

# 13) As an experiment I then burned the original OS onto the 8gb MicroSD, checked checksum then attempted to boot - still no dice
dd bs=4M if=original-os.img of=/dev/sdf
dd bs=4M if=/dev/sdf of=original-os-from-sd.img
sha1sum original-os-from-sd.img
=> b3c2e85e91636a05de49a5a67ead29b810d5d6d9

So now you are probably wondering why the new image didn't work with your old SD card? Well, if it was the full version with the Pixel desktop, I'm pretty sure it decompresses to more than 4GB, so that old card is too small.

Or, based on the confusing statements above, it could just be how you are imaging the cards.

Hmm ok, I now have an explanation for why the new Raspbian didn't work with the 4Gb card (although I would have expected dd to throw an error). WRT card imaging I hope the details above have cleared up some of the confusion.

Larger cards are not a problem, if you don't expand the filesystem on the image before inserting it into the PI and booting, it will automatically expand on the first boot.

As you are able to burn the image to the 8GB micro SD card with the adapter, you can assume the micro SD and adapter connections are not the problem. Can you view the contents of the boot/ partition on the micro SD card from the computer you burned the image with? If not, your image burning process may be the culprit. If you can, then it is possible your micro SD card is the culprit, and it just won't boot.

I will double check whether I can view /boot when I get home from work (card is on my workbench). I've added details of the process I used to burn the images (dd like any file-system clone) so I'd be grateful if you could take a look and let me know if there's any Pi specific stuff I am getting wrong (for example, why 4Mb block size?)

Many thanks for all the help!

[klricks]

As mentioned, the downloaded image MUST be properly unzipped using an unzip utility BEFORE writing the image to the SD card. You can't simply change the filename or directly download to the SD card. The unzipped image is close to 4GB. An 8GB+ SD card is required.

The SHA checksum shown on the download page is for the raw zipped image ONLY. Therefore the unzipped image which is put on the SD card will have a different SHA, which of course should not and cannot match the downloaded image. The RPF does not give the SHA for the unzipped image.

Note: Expanding the filesystem is something different. Expanding is done at first boot and will grow the image to fill the card.... 8GB or whatever the card size is.

[rpdom]

# 1) Burned the Jessie image onto an 8gb MicroSD card
dd bs=4M if=jessie.img of=/dev/sdf

# 2) Copied the file back to hard drive and verified the checksum
dd bs=4M if=/dev/sdf of=jessie-from-sd.img
sha1sum jessie-from-sd.img
=> e0eeb96e2fa10b3bd4b57454317b06f5d3d09d46

I'm surprised by that! If I copy the file to a card, then read the card back into a file the file will now be the size of the card and should give a different checksum.

What does "ls -l /dev/sdf" show after you write the image?

[FTrevorGowen]

1) Raspbian Jessie is not compatible with the original Raspberry Pis

Not true as far as I know, but I can dig up my old PiB and verify that for you if you'd like.

I have run the latest Raspbian images on an original PiB with no problems

Whilst I haven't (yet) done so for any of my "really old" Pi's I have done so for (a not quite as old) A+ using my P3B, FWIW, notes/screenshots are here:
http://www.cpmspectrepi.uk/raspberry_pi ... lPi3B.html
Trev.

[Madeye]

As mentioned, the downloaded image MUST be properly unzipped using an unzip utility BEFORE writing the image to the SD card. You can't simply change the filename or directly download to the SD card. The unzipped image is close to 4GB. An 8GB+ SD card is required.

dd is a utility for converting file systems to files and vice versa. I don't know but I suspect it may be the tool they use to make the Raspbian images. As such it's quite happy converting an img file into several partitions on an SD card and vice versa.

This is what I've done. I've written the Raspbian image to the SD card using dd then copied it back to a file again. I have then checked the file I have just created is identical to the one I started with. This tells me that the file was written correctly on the SD card (i.e. no corruption).

[Madeye]

# 1) Burned the Jessie image onto an 8gb MicroSD card
dd bs=4M if=jessie.img of=/dev/sdf

# 2) Copied the file back to hard drive and verified the checksum
dd bs=4M if=/dev/sdf of=jessie-from-sd.img
sha1sum jessie-from-sd.img
=> e0eeb96e2fa10b3bd4b57454317b06f5d3d09d46

I'm surprised by that! If I copy the file to a card, then read the card back into a file the file will now be the size of the card and should give a different checksum.

What does "ls -l /dev/sdf" show after you write the image?

Hah! Yes you've got me there - I was re-creating the steps from memory while at work. I did have to truncate the file copied back from the SD card to be the same length as the original file using "truncate --reference original.img" (I think this approach is outlined on the Pi installation page).

Now I look at it, I had to re-purpose my 8Gb micro SD card for a Windows 10 install at the weekend so I can't check anything right now (it's burning, burning at 1M block size, I don't expect it to finish soon). When it's done I'll take the whole process from the top and post the answers to the questions here.

Once again, thanks to all for the help.

[Madeye]

Whilst I haven't (yet) done so for any of my "really old" Pi's I have done so for (a not quite as old) A+ using my P3B, FWIW, notes/screenshots are here:
http://www.cpmspectrepi.uk/raspberry_pi ... lPi3B.html
Trev.

Thanks for this - looks pretty similar to what I did, apart from the bit where mine won't boot but I'll compare more carefully when I get a moment

[HawaiianPi]

As mentioned, the downloaded image MUST be properly unzipped using an unzip utility BEFORE writing the image to the SD card. You can't simply change the filename or directly download to the SD card. The unzipped image is close to 4GB. An 8GB+ SD card is required.

The SHA checksum shown on the download page is for the raw zipped image ONLY. Therefore the unzipped image which is put on the SD card will have a different SHA, which of course should not and cannot match the downloaded image. The RPF does not give the SHA for the unzipped image...

This ^

From what you have posted it seems like you are not extracting the image before burning it. Otherwise there is no way you could be getting the results you have. You MUST extract the image from the compressed .zip archive before writing the SD card.

After downloading the .zip file, unzip it to get the image file (.img) for writing to your SD card.

The downloaded file.

2016-09-23-raspbian-jessie.zip is 1.41 GB (1,519,156,009 bytes) in size, and has an sha1 hash of: e0eeb96e2fa10b3bd4b57454317b06f5d3d09d46

The decompressed image file.

2016-09-23-raspbian-jessie.img is 4.04 GB (4,348,444,672 bytes) in size, and has an sha1 hash of: 0564b912ca946750f5ef96eb4b6f7a561f79858e

[Madeye]

LMFAO! Ok yes I finally get it - took me a while

I grabbed the file with "wget https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_latest" which just created a file called "raspbian_latest". I assumed it was an image file not a zip and was the author of my own misfortune.

Thank you to klricks who pointed it out first. And thanks to HawaiianPi and others for pointing out klricks was right. And no thanks to me for not paying attention XD