Can't get past installing image. flashing red on pi

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1

Hello,

I just got my Rasp 3+ today and I'm having a hard time getting octopi to run.

I followed few youtube videos and after writing the image to the sd card (sandisk 16gb and also a 32gb) I get a "you need to format the drive to use it". I do see the card "boot" and I even edited my wifi settings...

I put the card in the rasperry 3+ and I get a flashing red on the device, and a rainbow screen on the screen.

I tried putting noobs on the card, and that worked. I was able to boot into rasbian and get on the internet and all...

what's going on here?

I used etcher and also tried win32 diskimage.

Thanks!

2

I think I found my answer. I should have gotten the 3... I figured getting the newest would be good. :frowning:

1 Like
3

Try either the instructions here or better yet, use the beta octopi 0.15 image.

https://discourse.octoprint.org/t/cant-get-past-installing-image-flashing-red-on-pi/883

4

Exactly same problem here
raspberry 3 B+ don't boot with octopi 0.14
flashing red light and pixel screen with lightning

=> installed nightly 2018-03-30_2018-03-13-octopi-stretch-lite-0.15.0.zip
=> boot OK , wifi OK
all seem good , not fully test yet

5

Latest nightly (3/30) is working for me. No issues

6

raspi 3 B+ needs a new device tree. Therefore it cannot run older images.

Besides of that, octopi 0.14 was probably broken. With a Raspi2, I experienced:

  • expanded file size is 1.844.688.663 bytes, which is not a multiple of 512 bytes. That sounds wrong.
  • after running this image for a couple of minutes, I had file system errrors -- on a brand new SD card
  • after each reboot, there were more file system errors -- until python and octoprint were destroyed

I solved the problem by doing a clean install from sources on top of the latest vanilla raspbian (which supports 3B+ too). Btw that's really stable, so the SD card was not the problem.

Adrian

7

@razorseal - if you used Etcher or Win32 Disk Imager to burn the appropriate OctoPi image to your SD card, you should be OK (as others have noted, OctoPi 0.14 will not work with the 3+. You need the latest nightly build. Once OctoPi 0.15 stable version is released, you can use that.)

You mentioned getting a warning after burning the image to the SD card that "you need to format the drive to use it". Ignore this. Do NOT format the drive after burnig the image to it. This warning is because the second partition the image puts n the drive is not readable by Windows or macOS (it's a Linux partition), so it thinks that partition needs to be formatted. If you do format it, you are erasing the guts of OctoPrint that you just installed.

NOTE: If you are reusing an SD card that is messed up, it is a good thing to reformat that card first to assure everything is wiped off it. I suggest using SD Card Formatter, uncheck the "quickformat" button and check the "Overwrite Format" button before formatting. This can be time consuming (especially on larger cards), but can help avoid odd errors down the road. Once you have completed this, then proceed with Win32 Disk Imager or Etcher to burn the OctoPi image to the card.

8

Writing an image to a card overwrites everything from the very begin of the media. Since that also includes the partition information, writing the image implicitly reformats the drive. No need to do this by hand, even for a card that is messed up. That just takes time but helps nothing. Only if the card is really defective, reformatting could reveal a hardware defect of the drive.

9

@aweiler - I may well be mistaken, but my understanding is that writing a smaller image (i.e. the OctoPi download) over a larger image (i.e. a "file system expanded" image of OctoPi or any other large image) only overwrites the part of the card required to fit the smaller image. When you expand the file system, some of the old data is there and has the potential to mess things up. I believe Etcher may do a full overwrite format before burning the image anyway. I'm not sure about others (Apple Pi Baker or Win32 Disk Imager). It's not a concern if you are writing a 16GB image onto a 16BG card, for example - in that case, you are overwriting everything on the card with the new image.

If you have good information that this is not the case, I'd love to hear it. The person who described this to me as "best practice" did not offer documentation (and I did not ask).

10

No, it doesn't. When you overwrite a 16GB card with a 2GB file system, accesses to the card will never go beyond the 2GB of the file system (unless you write a special program that accesses the media with root permissions). The remainder of the card will be simply ignored. When you now expand the file system, that file system is also reorganized and all the added space will be marked as free, no matter what mess that might have been in its previous life. Old data that might sit there is nothing that can put your system into danger. It will be not be read before it is allocated to a new file, at which time it will be overwritten.

Summary:

  • if you suspect that a card is physically damaged, you may want to perform a media check. Formatting tools may provide an option to verify the entire media before formatting (under Windows, you will need to turn off the "Quick format" option, which is normally on). Only in that case formatting before overwriting would make sense as to find out whether the media can be successfully written and read.
  • if the card is physically healthy and you just want to reinstall everything, just overwrite with a new image, even if that image is smaller than the physical capacity of the card. The remaining space will be reorganized properly when the volume is extended.