Over the past month or so, I've had my Raspi running on Chris Boot's custom Raspi Kernel (http://www.bootc.net/projects/raspberry-pi-kernel/), and having no issues what-so-ever with transmission daemon or anything I've tried to do with it (no overclock).
This morning I went to boot the raspberrypi and noticed that it didn't finish booting. I hooked up a hdmi monitor and noticed it just seems to "stop" right after it detects all of the USB devices (with no extra devices connected, it stops just after listing all of the info about the ethernet card), never reaching the login screen.
Plugging in a keyboard and hitting enter puts me into a busybox, and all I see is a #, so I can run simple commands like ls and cd but nothing more.
I thought this may have just been a corrupted SD card or something I had broken with an update, so I repartitioned, reformatted, and reflashed the official 2012-07-15-wheezy-raspbian image (SHA verified and all), and tried to boot it. The boot stopped, in the exact same spot.
Has anyone got any suggestions as to what I can do to narrow down the problem? I think it's aborting the boot process on the command right after the USB devices are listed, does anyone know what this command actually is?
I'm thinking there's a high chance that something happened to the SD card, but I haven't got another one to test. It's a SanDisk Ultra 4gb Class 4 card, and appears to be working fine. I've redone all the partitions in windows with DiskPart, and then reflashed it using WinImage, not sure what else I can do to it to "reset" it besides some sort of low level format.
Also, I just noticed that after the boot "stops", the OK light appears to (very) faintly pulse every second or so. If I remove the SD card, it becomes a very bright, long pulse. Also, voltage across Tp1 and Tp2 stays around 4.9V, so I don't think that's the problem.
Edit: It gets to "Processing /etc/profile... Done
# [ 8.338807] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0424, idProduct=9512
blah blah blah
[8.798867] smsc95xx v1.0.4
[8.864388] smsc95xx 1-1.1:1.0: eth0: register 'smsc95xx' at usb-bcm2708_usb-1.1, smsc95xx USB 2.0 Ethernet, my:ma:ca:dd:re:ss"
If I plug another device in (such as a keyboard), it just lists all of the info about that as well.
Any suggestions would be very welcome.
Re: Raspi suddenly won't finish boot
Do you have anything attached to the GPIO? It sounds a lot like accidentally booting in safe mode: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... 29&t=12007
Re: Raspi suddenly won't finish boot
Ahh, I did not know a safemode existed. I haven't got anything touching the GPIO pins, but it does appear to be in safe mode, since HDMI is now in forced VGA mode, and config.txt does appear to be ignored... Now to figure out why I'm in safe mode I guess. Is pin 5 polyfused? Safe mode is when pin 5 is grounded (pin 6 is ground), and I have been using the GPIO pins so maybe I've tripped something. I'll try forcing pin 5 up by giving it 3.3 volts at boot.
Re: Raspi suddenly won't finish boot
Hurrah! Stuck a paperclip between pin 1 and pin 5, giving pin 5 3.3 volts, and it booted first time. However, upon reboot, it went straight back into safe mode. It's being detected as grounded, even though nothing is connected to it...which I suppose is possible, since these pins aren't defined as 1 or 0 unless they have something attached to them right?
Anyway I stuck avoid_safe_mode=1 in config.txt and it boots fine now. Thanks for the help!
Anyway I stuck avoid_safe_mode=1 in config.txt and it boots fine now. Thanks for the help!