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After working flawlessly for many months, in the morning, possibly after some packages were installed (or any other reason), my raspi showed a frozen desktop. I could not connect via ssh, so I had to pull the plug.

From then on, I was never able to boot again, always ending up with the attached boot messages. Pressing Enter just prints the same message again.

It is running from a healthy ssd. I fsck'ed both partitions and no errors were found (at least I think so - the vfat fsck did not give any output).

Still, I assume something is amiss with the /boot partition (the one the screen is complaining about). What should my next steps be? How could I check, if there really is something wrong with my boot partition and what exactly could be wrong?

I am using Raspian without noobs.

Setting the whole system up from scratch would be the very last thing, I's like to do. There were quite a few services running.

boot screen

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  • The error message is NOT saying there is anything wrong with the boot partition, but that it can't be found. sudo blkid /dev/mmcblk0 (substitute your device - probably sda) will show the PARTUUID which should be checked for consistency with cmdline.txt and /etc/fstab. It is simple to format the FAT32 partition and copy from another (adjusting PARTUUID to match). The boot MUST be OK as you have booted which will happen independent of PARTUUID!
    – Milliways
    Oct 14 '19 at 23:32
  • I checked for inconsistencies, but there were none. Which is as expected, as I used the system for quite some time now and it always booted normally. Nothing changed, no partitions were added, etc. that could somehow explain a change in UUIDs.
    – Jan
    Oct 15 '19 at 11:21
  • Looks like it's having trouble with partition 2c192fba-01 -- the message is also telling you that it's 53.1% the way through checking the (same?) disk, did you leave it to finish the check? You could also try re-booting into Recovery Mode (by holding down SHIFT during boot) and run the disk check manually.
    – Roger Jones
    Oct 15 '19 at 12:29
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Get a new SDCard and a USB reader. Etch a copy of Raspbian Lite on the new card. Boot that.

Mount the broken system in a USB reader. Mount the USB reader in your RPi.

Open a command line and use sudo -s to get a root shell.

Run these commands for i in a1 a2 a5 a6; do umount /dev/sd$i; fsck -f -y /dev/sd$i; done

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt or mount /dev/sda6 (if NOOBS)

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot or mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/boot (if NOOBS)

mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev

mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys

mount -t proc /proc /mnt/proc

cd /mnt; chroot . (note the trailing full stop)

apt update; apt install --reinstall raspberrypi-kernel raspberrypi-bootloader

exit

poweroff

Swap the cards back and it should boot normally.

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5
  • I think the OP is booting from an external drive (the details about which could be made clearer, "It is running from a healthy ssd"). The same idea should work the catch being if the Pi was configured to boot from USB it may no longer boot from SD (I think that's the deal), but a USB stick could be used.
    – goldilocks ♦
    Oct 14 '19 at 22:03
  • My recipe works regardless of where the broken /boot and root partitions live, as long as they can be mounted for the chroot the raspberrypi-kernel and raspberrypi-bootloader packages can be re-installed in a chroot.
    – Dougie
    Oct 14 '19 at 22:15
  • I'll give this a go, thanks!
    – Jan
    Oct 14 '19 at 22:32
  • @Jan ...but you should it only try on a copy of your installation.
    – Ingo
    Oct 15 '19 at 8:09
  • That did the job, thanks a lot, @Dougie!
    – Jan
    Oct 15 '19 at 11:52

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