Quad Pi SD card problem

[geffers]

I've got four Pi devices, two with SD card and 2 with micro SD card.

Enthusiastically received my NEW quad Pi recently from Pimoroni.

My micro SD cards are both Sandisk 8GB both in working devices. Inserted one of these into my new quad Pi, wouldn't boot. Tried the other micro SD card, failed at boot. Both of these back in my older Pi devices work fine.

Email Pimoroni, they advised updating via apt-get update then upgrade to get latest kernel, did so again failed at boot. Reformatted one card, put noobs on it, older device sees it fine, new quad fails at boot.

Returned to Pimoroni and they advise that with Samsung SD card and noobs it boots fine soi they are returning device to me.

I am now very unsure of the reliability of this device.

Anyone else experienced any problems?

Geffers

[DougieLawson]

Buy a fresh new 8GB micro SD from Tesco, Sainsburys, ASDA or Morrisons (they're in the cameras & tablets section).

Download the 2015-02-16 version of NOOBS or plain Raspbian. Write the new card and boot it in any old Pi. Shut down cleanly. Swap it to the 2B and it will boot if the 2B is OK.

[geffers]

Buy a fresh new 8GB micro SD from Tesco, Sainsburys, ASDA or Morrisons (they're in the cameras & tablets section).

Download the 2015-02-16 version of NOOBS or plain Raspbian. Write the new card and boot it in any old Pi. Shut down cleanly. Swap it to the 2B and it will boot if the 2B is OK.

I shouldn't have to go through that sort or rigmarole to get a new device to boot. If I have a working OS in one machine it should work in another; all my others do.

Geffers

[Pi_Fanatic]

Geffers, the new Pi processor Arm7 requires updated drivers that are not in the traditional B+ operating system. You shouldn't have to buy a new microSD card but you will have to reformat one of yours using the SD Formatter tool and copy over the latest Noobs release - 1.3.12 or 1.4 will work just fine. The best part is that these will now work in your B+ also.

Pi Fanatic

[kusti8]

Geffers, the new Pi processor Arm7 requires updated drivers that are not in the traditional B+ operating system. You shouldn't have to buy a new microSD card but you will have to reformat one of yours using the SD Formatter tool and copy over the latest Noobs release - 1.3.12 or 1.4 will work just fine. The best part is that these will now work in your B+ also.

Pi Fanatic

You don't have to reformat it. If he is using NOOBS, then there are special instructions that the pi hut made on how to upgrade that.

[topshed]

You shouldn't need to reformat the SD card.

The main command to run is

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

and it never hurts to run

sudo rpi-update

too.

[ghans]

Actually , the latter is quite dangerous and should be only done
if you are troubleshooting a specific issue together with
Raspberry Pi engineers.


ghans

[geffers]

So if I run sudo apt-get dist-upgrade on my existing cards they should run OK on the Pi2

Geffers

[B.Goode]

So if I run sudo apt-get dist-upgrade on my existing cards they should run OK on the Pi2

The process is very clearly documented here: http://thepihut.com/blogs/raspberry-pi- ... berry-pi-2

Note that if the 'working on a original RPi' card was created via NOOBS then there are additional steps required over and above what you have mentioned.

[DougieLawson]

Note that if the 'working on a original RPi' card was created via NOOBS then there are additional steps required over and above what you have mentioned.

Which is precisely the reason I suggested buying a fresh card and using a fresh download of NOOBS (or plain Raspbian).

[B.Goode]

Note that if the 'working on a original RPi' card was created via NOOBS then there are additional steps required over and above what you have mentioned.

Which is precisely the reason I suggested buying a fresh card and using a fresh download of NOOBS (or plain Raspbian).

And I agree that is the cleanest most comprehensible way of making progress. But @geffers appears to be reluctant to take that approach, so I have simply referred to information that might assist with the process of 'rolling forward' a working installation from older hardware to the new.

I shouldn't have to go through that sort or rigmarole to get a new device to boot. If I have a working OS in one machine it should work in another.

In my professional experience it was almost always the case that a new version of hardware would require a new/updated release of the Operating System to support it. That was certainly the case with DEC (Vax/VMS), Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics (SGI) to name-drop just a few examples.

[RaTTuS]

So if I run sudo apt-get dist-upgrade on my existing cards they should run OK on the Pi2

Geffers

yes...
YMMV

on an existing RPi
do a
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
wait for it to finish
sudo shutdown -h now #to stop the RPi
take micro sd card out and stuff it into the new B2

boot it and it should be happy

[user007]

My micro SD cards are both Sandisk 8GB both in working devices. Inserted one of these into my new quad Pi, wouldn't boot. Tried the other micro SD card, failed at boot. Both of these back in my older Pi devices work fine.
Returned to Pimoroni and they advise that with Samsung SD card and noobs it boots fine soi they are returning device to me.
I am now very unsure of the reliability of this device.
Anyone else experienced any problems?
Geffers

The new RPI2 has different boot kernels and you should use proper RPI2 OS distribution.
You may just download new RPI2 OS image from this site and use SDFormatter and Win32DiskImager to format your microSD card and write the new RPI2 OS image. Any popular 8 GB+ microSD card like San Disk, Samsung, Transcend would be fine.
You may try also an alternative of NOOBS called Berryboot - Boot menu/OS installer for ARM devices (http://sourceforge.net/projects/berryboot/). It is needed to download 32.8MB zip file and to copy the unzipped files to a FAT or FAT32 formatted microSD card.
Then you may start RPI2 and add to the Berryboot main menu images of different RPI2 OS - Raspbian, Fedora 21, etc.
The OS images are downloaded from sourceforge.net at full Internet speed and installed immediately - easy and simple. You may install many RPI2 OS on the same SD card.

[BMS Doug]

So if I run sudo apt-get dist-upgrade on my existing cards they should run OK on the Pi2

Geffers

yes...
YMMV

on an existing RPi
do a
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
wait for it to finish
sudo shutdown -h now #to stop the RPi
take micro sd card out and stuff it into the new B2

boot it and it should be happy

Oddly I have one SD card that will not work with the Pi2 despite having done a dist-upgrade, I'm not too concerned as I do have a different SD card that does work on the Pi2 (having been upgraded by dist-upgrade) so I haven't really looked into why this one doesn't work.

[geffers]

Note that if the 'working on a original RPi' card was created via NOOBS then there are additional steps required over and above what you have mentioned.

Which is precisely the reason I suggested buying a fresh card and using a fresh download of NOOBS (or plain Raspbian).

My Pi2 was supplied without a microSD card. Had spare SD cards but not micro.

Obvious option was to try the two microSD cards I had in two working R-Pi devices.

Pomoroni suggested a few commands to correct it but not the detailed upgrade explained in the Pi Hut article.

Geffers

[DougieLawson]

Pomoroni suggested a few commands to correct it but not the detailed upgrade explained in the Pi Hut article.

The missing piece is that you need to muck about with a NOOBS card to replace the "firmware" and kernel in the first FAT partition to get NOOBS working. It's not the partition that's mounted as /boot when Raspbian is running.

Yet another reason to avoid using NOOBS, where possible.