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Recently, my Raspbian OS froze on my Raspberry Pi 4, and when I restarted the machine, it immediately produced a solid green screen. Research suggests that it is most likely due to a corrupted OS, and the most popular solution is just to reinstall a fresh copy. However, I don't want to have to set up the software on my Pi all over again. Is there a way to repair a Raspbian installation without wiping the SD card?

I should add that the green screen comes up almost immediately on boot, so there's no opportunity for me to jump into a command line interface first.

Thanks in advance to the community for their help!

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  • "the most popular solution is just to reinstall a fresh copy" -> Yes, among the desperate and naive (and I mean that seriously and objectively). The normal way to deal with a corrupted filesystem is to run fsck on it. WRT "green screen", you might want to describe this in better detail, because it is not at all normal or commonplace: After more than a decade and 36K+ questions there are only two here that mention a green screen at boot, and one of them is in reference to something attached via a USB-to-VGA adapter...
    – goldilocks ♦
    Mar 3 at 15:12
  • What happens if you power up with NO SD card inserted? The same, or something different?
    – goldilocks ♦
    Mar 3 at 15:15
  • You can see a photo of this green screen phenomenon here: tacticalware.com/raspberry-pi-green-screen. Although there's not much discussion of it on this forum, I do see a lot of mentions elsewhere.
    – 123MilitaryNerd
    Mar 4 at 21:54
  • Since the Pi boots directly to the green screen, I can't run fsck natively. I do have the SD card plugged into another laptop and tried fsck there, but the card mounts as read-only, and I can't get around that. I hadn't thought of booting the Pi without the SD card, but I'll give it a try.
    – 123MilitaryNerd
    Mar 4 at 21:54
  • Okay, booting without the SD card gives me this: i.imgur.com/NO5MjKg.jpg.
    – 123MilitaryNerd
    Mar 4 at 22:42

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