I’ve been having a problem for a few days with my Raspberry PI 3.
Here is my current setup: Raspberry pi 3, HDD with its own power supply, raspberry pi 3 connected in USB on my TV, and connected with an Ethernet cable.
I’ve been running on this setup for more than 2 years and I’ve never had any problems.
But for a few days I have big freeze problems with OSMC.
I started looking at my microSD card, and this one had a problem, so I made a new installation of OSMC 2018.1 on a new card.
But I still have big problems, it freezes in a totally random way, without any particular reasons.
I see you have external drives connected. Are the self-powered, or connected to a powered USB hub? Or powered by the Pi? If powered by the Pi then I’d suggest trying a new power supply.
Opps, I missed that bit! A VERY bad idea to power the Pi via the TV USB. As @the_bo pointed out, possible corruption problems. Also the TV most likely will not supply enough power. Get a dedicated power supply for the Pi.
However, OP did say that it was working fine for 2 years when setup like this.
Maybe OP has a TV like mine … Sony TV is great with the USB port.
Seems to have enough power to keep RPi (1 and now 2) happy (no extra peripherals attached to RPi USB and connecting to LAN via Ethernet) and when using TV remote to switch off TV … the TV sends CEC display off info but keeps USB power on long enough for the RPi to perform orderly shutdown.
Check that OSMC/Kodi CEC settings are still set to tell RPi to shutdown when display turned off.
If the power from TV USB was marginal then it is possible that newer OSMC build needs more power to do stuff and means that RPi could suffer but modern RPi should show warning on screen.
(OP said that USB disk had own power supply)
So, while using TV USB remains a recommended “no” some might find, like me, that it works well.
Think about it, you hit the power button, the TV tells the Pi to shutdown. Fine. Now is the TV going to actually wait until the Pi is off? Probably not, the shutdown has started and then the power is pulled.
It may work for you, but it is against our recommendations. You are at great risk to corrupt your filesystem by pulling the power when you turn off the TV.
In my case, the Sony TV cuts the power to the USB a few minutes after pressing the on/off button in the remote control.
If OSMC has not shutdown by then, then there is already a significant problem.
However, I did say that this is not suitable for all.
Especially if there are problems like the OP says - and the reason why this thread was opened - it’s unwise to recommend any scenario which might fail for most and has a great risk of breaking the filesystem… Anybody can test something like this at own risk, of course, but it doesn’t lead anywhere to suggest this, if there are problems (which might very well be because of this for the OP). So, please don’t recommend anything that might cause problems (or even hardware damage) for others.
This sounds very much like a corruption. The thing is, I’d say, that nobody can predict when a corruption caused by this setup might happen. But it’s very likely that it’s related to your setup (power from the TV’s USB port). No problems for a long time don’t mean that this can still be the cause… Maybe your were lucky for 2 years and now you’re not.
Please test with a proper PSU with enough Ampere and report back.
I have the same problem with my rpi3 osmc setup, which I was using without any problems for > 6 months regularly.
The updates around last month or so, started the problems, like random freezing. (most of the time during the startup itself)
As you guys pointed out, I diagnosed it to be a power issue.
The update(s) seem to have introduced something which is demanding more power.
I should note that I was using the same power brick for the last 6 months without a problem.
Due to limited time and lack of tools, I haven’t looked at the update to see what were the software changes in the update, nor into the power supply to see what kind of power it supplies and spikes it has to go through.
Since I didn’t feel like changing my physical setup now (i.e. power supply), As a quick hack, I worked around it by under-clocking the pi. (Of course there is a performance cost, but something working is better than nothing)
I under-clocked the cpu by ~100Mhz. (YMMV according to your power supply, peripherals etc)
Hopefully someone will look into this and properly fix this.
I’ll admit I don’t have enough data to prove/disprove that my power supply has degraded over the last one month.
(Just FYI, I’m using a decent 5V 2A power supply, without any peripherals, which is what’s mentioned in osmc wiki)
However, judging by the amount of posts about freezes in the sub-forum, I form the opinion that this is a regression for a good amount of users.
Bug or feature I don’t know for sure, I’m just a wayfarer stating opinions.
A handful of users out of tens of thousands of OSMC installations on Raspberry Pi. There are many possible reasons for freezes. Power Supply is one of them, bad addons another.
