Hardware test for Pi2 v1.1 (armv7)

AIUI the green LED remaining [solidly] on indicates that the SD card isn't being found.

Shouldn't it flash as it accesses it?

Have you tried at least a new SD card installation?

Yes. On a successful boot both red and green LEDs turn on, green flashes, the disk light flashes, green goes off and boot starts. My first thought was that the Pi didn't get far enough to look for the microSD card. IIRC, a Pi emits an error message if looks for a card and doesn't find one.

Up to now, no. Next time it happens I'll try switching to an old RasPiOS microSD. That won't do what I want, but if it does something different that'll be a good sign. It simply never occurred to me that the microSD might fail reversibly. Maybe it can.

Meanwhile I was wondering if anybody knew of a test suite that more fully explores a Pi. It seems like there must be some kind of boot debugger.

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska

You can toggle a flag in the bootcode binary that enables output of early-stage debugging info to the UART.

What I discovered when doing SD-less booting, that the SD card light continued to flash even once booted as no SD car was ever found. Threw me because I was running headless and thought it hadn't booted when it actually had.

I fiound a magic spell to stop that somewhere.

I remember once writing a bit of BIOS for a PC manufacture, and thinking 'at this point in time, I am the only person in the world who understands this piece of code'. Five times in my life doing technical support I have had on the end of the phone *the person who actually wrote the code.*

A college friend is one of half a dozen people who developed NAND flash memory.

My point being that the pool of people who *actually know stuff * is often vanishingly small.

Compare with the vast number who just use it. Or bugger around with it until it works.

I don't think it's getting that far, but have bookmarked the link and will experiment more when the host is free.

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska

8-)

There are a few things I did become an absolute expert in, the rest I just bugger around till it works.

Life is simply too short.