Selfhosted

39226 readers

483 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world

HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz

[SOLVED] Help debugging an issue with Raspberry Pi 4B boot (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by justpassingby@sh.itjust.works to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hi all,

I am having a strange new issue with the one of the raspberry pi 4b I have running at home. One of them failed/restarted for some reasons and it is now stuck at boot with the line:

Waiting for root device LABEL=writable...

I am booting this PI from USB. From what I can see the disk is ok. I can mount it on my laptop and access it correctly. The partition is labelled correctly. I tried to move it to another PI I have and I have the same error (I did this to remove the possibility it was the PI/USB port). I am pretty sure it is not the power that is the issue (since I am giving it more than enough).

All of this was working correctly until now (for months). Ubuntu may have updated something (my fault, I may not have disabled the auto-update) or something else could have broken.

I can try to point to the partition via UUID instead of the label, but something tells me that is not the issue. Did anybody encounter such an issue in the past or has any advice on how to debug it?

Thank you for your help and time.

===

Solution: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/1646333

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] justpassingby@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hi, just writing it here in case you were curious of the cause of the problem.

I finally had some time today to work on it. What I tried was to copy the content of the system boot partition of another PI, one that I configured at the same time/day, and compared file by file with the content of the partition in the broken one. Now there were some diff in the some binary files as expected, but what surprised me was that one file was ONLY present in the working one... initrd.img XD Now, don't ask me why the hell the file was not there. Maybe it got corrupted somehow, since nothing touches this partition as far as I am aware aside at boot time. Luckily, there was .bak file present in the partition which I renamed and... it worked.

Lesson learned: I now have a copy of the boot partition of every PI I managed (it is only 167MB pre tar-zip, so it is not a cost) and I have it backed up safely on another system. Should another file get corrupted in the future (maybe this time without a .bak) I have an older working copy if it, and I can restore the service without the need to format everything.

Thank you so much for your help and advice!

[–] Anafroj@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ahah, so that's what initrd are called on Pi. :P Good catch!

Funny enough, I don't have such file on mine, the only *.img I have is the kernel, kernel8.img. I guess it's OS specific.

The .bak things sound like an interrupted update, or something. Like if the updater moved the current initrd as a backup file, then started building the new initrd and crashed or was rebooted before completion. That's what I really dislike about automatic updates, I prefer to be sure to know it's running, and see the output. :)

Congrats on sorting it out!