Pi memory card will not boot LE, but will OSMC

1st Official Post

    One of my 3B Pi's running LE was crashed by the 9.2.3 update - the update initiated, but the Pi never completed its re-boot and became completely unresponsive (my other LE Pi did the update just fine).

    I re-imaged the SD card with LE and again the Pi would not boot. I also have some OSMC devices so I re-imaged the card again with OSMC, and this time the Pi booted and installed OSMC. I have since tried to go back to LE but every time, when the Pi is powered up, I just get a blank screen on the TV. I then run the OSMC installer and the Pi boots just fine.


    I am using the SD Formatter utility on Windows to wipe the card then using the LE installer utility to image the card. Is there any reason why this might fail for LE but work for OSMC?

    thanks chewitt. What exactly do I need to do regarding bootsector.img? Since I've been imaging the SD card using the LE USB-SD creator tool, I had assumed it would be taking care of any requirements like that, when I image with the OSMC installer, the card just works.

    I went round the block several times on this trying Etcher and the LE Windows installer, attempting to restore the bootsector.img, etc and no joy. The Pi simply will not boot with an LE image.

    Run the OSMC installer on the card and the Pi boots first time.

    OK, some progress. This Pi was running LE 9.2.1 just fine before the 9.2.3 update was issued, but once the 9.2.3 update got to the reboot after the .tar file extraction completed, I had an unbootable device. And as posted above, attempting clean installs of 9.2.3 via the Windows installer is again giving me an unbootable device.

    I figured that 9.2.3 itself might be the problem, and so I just tried the LE installer with 9.2.1, and the Pi booted straight away. I completed the set-up wizard, and then applied the 9.2.3. update. Once again, the Pi rebooted, I got the on-screen message about the .tar archive extraction, everything was fine up to the final reboot, the Pi then rebooted - and once again, nothing.

    So for now, I can boot a clean install of 9.2.1 but cannot update it to 9.2.3 or apply a clean install of 9.2.3. This Pi is a spare device so I can do further testing if there is any community interest in identifying the root cause. I have another LE Pi that updated to 9.2.3 without issue, so am rather puzzled.

    This sounds a lot like the "black screen" issue on RPi3 as reported by a few others.

    Either stay on 9.2.1 for now or update the RPi firmware files on the FAT partitions as described here RPi3 Updade to 9.2.3 ending in Black Screen

    9.2.4 will ship with that firmware, so RPi3 issues should be resolved, but we don't have an ETA when 9.2.4 will be released (we're waiting on kodi Leia 18.8 release).

    so long,

    Hias

    thanks Hias. So if 9.2.3 has problems on only some Pi’s, is that because there are different versions of the board? I thought both my LE Pi’s were the same model.


    so I guess the OSMC team has been more cautious with firmware since the latest OSMC boots ok?

    When tracking latest RPi firmware versions - which were very important for RPi4 - we totally missed that Raspbian had frozen the RPi0-3 firmwares at the April 15 version and only shipped updated RPi4 firmwares.

    So LE 9.2.3 shipped with a newer RPi0-3 firmware than Raspbian (and OSMC which is based on that) that's causing issues on about one out of a couple thousand RPi3s.

    so long,

    Hias