Post-mortem - Pi3 - ElectronDepot

I have 3 PIs which are on one power circuit. Last week, all three went off line. It was quickly obvious that the reason for this was that the RCD for that circuit had tripped.

When I turned the trip back on, everything except Pi3 came back to life. On Pi3, nothing, not even the power light. I assumed that the power supply had failed, and that had taken out the RCD.

I swapped the power supply, and the power light came on, but no activity. The Pi was moved to the office, where I connected it up to a monitor, and there was no sign of it booting.

I had half expected the SD card to have got corrupted when the power went off, so I put in a new one (with NOOBS on it), ran through the installation, set up a few basics via raspi-config (timezone, host name, enabled SSH), rebooted, and all was fine.

I returned the PI to its usual home, connected it back up to the network, and powered on. The power light came on, but nothing else. So back to the office with it. Again (as with the original SD card), nothing on the monitor.

I dug out another PI, and tried the second card in that, and again no joy, so it looks as though sometime during the second power down / third boot, it had trashed the SD card. I tried another NOOBS SD card in the original PI, and this time it didn't even attempt to boot. Swapped the card into the spare PI, and away it went. So the second PI and the third card combination seems to have worked. It has now been running for 24 hours or so, and seems happy.

I'm assuming that the original PI is now dead, but I'm curious as to what might have happened, it seems a bit odd that it briefly came back to life, only to die again.

Adrian

-- To Reply : replace "bulleid" with "adrian" - all mail to bulleid is rejected Sorry for the rigmarole, If I want spam, I'll go to the shops Every time someone says "I don't believe in trolls", another one dies.

I had a Pi trash its SD card image (the card itself was still OK) after a normal reboot - not even a shutdown followed by removal of power. So I had to build it again from NOOBS and applying all the changes and installations that I'd made previously. That was the trigger for me a) to describe step-by-step what I did when I was originally configuring it, and b) make an image of the SD card after it was fully configured, and then another about every 6 months, so I've got something to fall back on, even if data needs to be updated from the last backup.

In my case, the Pi stopped part of the way through booting, and I couldn't find anything online that described how to rectifiy the problem, short of "start again from scratch".

Ironically, the problem happened during a clean reboot, but a few months later we started getting lots of power cuts - typically for about a second, just long enough to reboot computers, and every single time the Pi came bouncing back again without any problem. Likewise for my Windows 7 PC. I think the only thing I had to rectify was my router which after a bout of glitches every few seconds for a couple of minutes (at which time I turned all the electronic devices off!) the router eventually lost all its customised settings like port-forwarding, non-standard network name, reserved IP addresses and needed those to be added again. Thankfully after everyone in the village played merry hell with the electricity, they came and sorted out the problem, which was tree branches overhanging the HV lines somewhere near here, which tripped a circuit breaker and brought in a backup supply route which then failed, so try original one - repeat ad nauseam. Since then, I think the only power cut has been when a tree fell on a line in one of the gales earlier this year, and the power was back on again within about an hour.

A tree that falls on line is forgivable. Branches that *keep* touching lines and which are not preventively trimmed *before* they cause a problem, are not forgivable. The power company kept bleating about "the power was only off for a second" and I said "a second is all it takes to make everything reboot". I think a lot of people were thinking about investing in UPSes if it was going to become a regular occurrence. The ultimate was one night when the power cycled about every 10 seconds for an hour. I was on the phone to Powergen (from a hard-wired, non DECT phone) and I was able to say "it's gone again... oh, and again, ... and again..."