Raspberry Pi3 B+ not booting, no output to screen

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

Hi,

I’ve been using tv headend and osmc for a while now and it’s all been working fine…until…!

There is no more hdmi output to screen. When I put a different micro sd card in with Raspian it displays fine.

I think my micro sd card with osmc must be corrupted in some way, what diagnostics can I do before I rewrite a new version of osmc on the card?

(I’m not sure even if the Pi is picking up an ip address so I am unable to access it with ssh)

Thanks in advance.

Zahar

2

Well you could boot your Raspbian and then connect the SD Card via a USB SD Card reader to check the contents.

3

I’ve done that and can read the contents of the Micro sd which is displaying OSMC operating system files, but what do I need to check exactly?

4

So first you have two partitions? Boot and Root?
Then check if on boot you have a proper config.txt and also a kernel.img

5

Partitions are there but config.txt is blank?

Kernel.img is also present.

6

Well you could try to generate a new config.txt but my gut feeling is the SD card failed so you might be better of by backing up your config from the card and do a new install on another card or at least test this card first with h2testw.

7

There has been reports of this happening with sudden power loss or some other unknown situation. Testing the SD is never a bad idea but I personally, assuming your still on Kodi v18, would just put the following in config.txt and see if that gets it going…

gpu_mem_1024=256
hdmi_ignore_cec_init=1  
disable_overscan=1
start_x=1  
disable_splash=1
gpu_mem_256=112  
gpu_mem_512=144  
sdtv_aspect=1
8

I think a sudden power loss was the issue here. Have tried the config.txt file you suggest but no luck. Will have to be a new install.

9

Some good news. Have over-written the micro sd with a new osmc image. The Pi boots…with ALL the old settings! TV Head end is in there, same ip, etc…etc.How did this happen?!

10

It either means your SD Card is broken and is in read only mode. Or you written to wrong partition. How did you wrote the image?

11

Just used the Raspberry Pi imager app on a mac.

12

To install OSMC?

13

Yes.

14

When some SD cards fail, the controller will fall over in to a silent read-only mode. This gives the illusion to the OS that data is being written but it is not. This is why your old settings and environment were persistent even after writing another image.