green LED flashes 4 times - rpi B 3+ but works USB-boot

Jan 12, 2021 2 Replies

Hi!



I have for a long time run a rpi 3B+ by having



/boot /



on the SD card and all application specific stuff on a small (80 GB) USB-disk 2.5" spinning metal



So the other day I bought a 120 GB SSD disk at amazon



And I use gparted on another Linux box to



- clean out the new SSD



- copy /boot from SD card and paste on SSD



- copy / from sdcard and paste on SSD



- copy /bnlbot from old USB-drive and paste on SSD



The whole procedure was very smooth - I did not know of copy/paste within gparted before.



in /boot/cmdlie,txt I changed the root UUID in /etc/fstab I did the same, changing UUID and PARTITIONUUID to new values.



Nice - unmount from PC and put SSD in rpi via USB - with no SD card Power on



LED flashes 4 times - seem to mean


  • 4 flashes: start.elf not launched

But - the PI works, I can SSH to it the database works, my applications has started.



dmesg confirms boot from USB (well there is no SD-card so)



Everything but the LED seems fine



Why does it flash? I cannot google an answer to make it not flash



From the above reference:

Note that 4-flashes may point to a defective SD-card holder, if one or more of the data contacts is intermittent it can lead to this problem.

"No SD card" probably can't be differentiated from "Bad SD card holder" as no contact with SD card.

Chris Elvidge England

Den 2021-01-13 kl. 15:07, skrev Chris Elvidge:

Well, yes, hmm how could I miss that?

the boot order is at

with a comment

"If there is no SD card inserted, the SD boot mode takes five seconds to fail. To reduce this and fall back to USB more quickly, you can either insert an SD card with nothing on it or use the GPIO bootmode OTP setting described above to only enable USB."

So I halted, inserted a small empty one and boot and now no more flashing. Thanks

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