One Boot Per SD Card

Maybe not waiting long enough before shutting it down - is it still re-sizing the root partition?

I wait until the monitor goes into standby. But I'll try it again with a longer wait. Thanks.

Update:

Waiting several minutes before removing power, and several more before reapplying power, changed nothing.

I tried the whole procedure again (transfer Jessie to card, boot), only this time I did an update | upgrade before shutting down, then "sudo shutdown -h now" and killed power. When I powered-up the next time, I noticed that the green LED kept flashing about once every two seconds. Thinking that the Pi might actually be alive, even though there was absolutely no activity on the monitor (it hadn't even come out of standby), I typed "sudo shutdown -r now".

That worked! The monitor came out of standby and the Pi rebooted normally. At least now I know that the Pi is actually booting. Apparently for some reason the HDMI driver is not launching upon initial boot, but is launching upon reboot.

Not sure this is relevant, but I've noticed that a Pi booted without a monitor connected leaves the HDMI port off. Maybe your Pi didn't recognize the monitor in the first attempts and did on the successful one. Why that might be isn't obvious, but trying a different monitor might shed some, er, light.... 8-)

My $.02

bob prohaska

Not only is it relevant, it's correct!

Once I realized that my Pi was actually booting, just not enabling HDMI, I did some online searching and some experimentation. For whatever reason my Pi isn't recognizing my monitor upon the initial boot -- perhaps it's because the monitor is in standby; I don't know. But whatever the reason, it appears that bootcode_delay in config.txt is the solution. I haven't tried it, yet, but judging from the description in the RPi documentation, bootcode_delay should do the job: "This is particularly useful to insert a delay before reading the EDID of the monitor, which can help if the Pi and monitor are powered from the same source but the monitor takes longer to start up than the Pi. Try setting this value if the display detection is wrong on initial boot, but is correct if you soft-reboot the Pi without removing power from the monitor."

Thank you.

In my case it was slightly different. The issue seemed to be whether a monitor was plugged into the HDMI port. It didn't matter if the monitor was turned on. Seemingly there's a sense resistor or something that tells the Pi a monitor is connected. I'm not even sure it's in the monitor, it might be the cable.

Anyway, it's good to learn you're making progress!

bob prohaska

Any particular reason you power down? You could just as well 'sudo reboot'.

Only because I have to turn it off sooner or later, and after I do, I need to be able to turn it on again.

Have you looked here:

I have

hdmi_force_hotplug=1

in my /boot/config.txt file (among other lines), which addresses this very issue.

Yes, thank you. Once I realized that it was an HDMI issue, and not a failure-to-boot issue, the solution was easy.