Raspberry Pi 3 will not display to HDMI monitor nor ssh

Question

I have Raspbian 9.9 installed on the SD card which runs fine and displays to my monitor via DVI to HDMI adapter.

I formatted a 1TB SSD to ext4 and followed the https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-boot-from-usb/ tutorial.

After successfully running from that drive for several weeks without the SD card, I added Nextcloud server which has been up for a month with 300gb of data.

Today, after updating and upgrading (sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade), my monitor would not display after reboot.

If I return to the SD card and boot, the monitor works normally (as it does with several other machines). I can connect to the Nextcloud server from a client at 10.0.1.4/nextcloud on my home network.

Another working monitor behaves the same way. When I try to ssh the Pi, it does not accept my password.

Is there anything else to check before wiping the Pi, reformatting the SSD to EXT4, and beginning again? The Pi is powered, and the SSD is also.

The SSD mounts as an external drive when I boot from the SD card.

Answer 1

By updating and upgrading it may have tried to update the settings it originally has with trying to boot from sd instead of the SSD, I would first take out the SD Card, plug it into a computer and add an empty file called ssh, then put it back on the Raspberry pi and boot. After it boots you should be able to ssh to the pi long enough for you to run another

Sudo raspi-config

So you can enable ssh interface once again.

If the pi doesn’t even boot from SSD then you may have to re-flash the SD with raspbian first update and upgrade and finally re-do the boot from SSD.

Probably the fastest way atm.

Good luck

Answer 2

Re-imaging the SD card turned out to be my solution (after fruitless troubleshooting efforts).