My pi recently crashed out of the blue and now it won't boot at all. The screen has a blank input. The ACT LED is flashing 7 times and the PWR LED is solid on. Any help? Can't find anything around Google about this many times flashing leds.
Thanks guys!!
As my answer to this question says, the amount of blinks the ACT light makes determines the reason your RPi isn't booting. (I'm assuming that you are using Raspbian and that your power supply is sufficient and that you've checked your sd card for corruption and a few other things because your question did not specify anything other than the ACT LED flashes 7 times.)
7 Blinks means that kernel.img isn't found.
To fix this, read your sd card with another computer and check that kernel.img is in the boot partition of the card. If it is not, you may be able to extract another Raspbian image and place kernel.img into the partition.
If it is in your boot partition, and/or replacing it does not work, you may be out of luck. Backup anything that you can then reformat and reinstall Raspbian on the card.
There at too many report of SD card damaged when active on a sudden power loss. Without a orderly shutdown, you have a very high probability of data loss. (1) Just search for 'damaged SD'; some empiric reports go as high as 5% of the time!!
There is no single recipe to fix this problem and what area may be damaged is unpredictable.
You may save most data and perhaps, recover the full system, following one or more of the following steps.
ls /dev/sd* find the damaged SD card just mounted, it will show as /dev/sda or perhaps /dev/sdb.
ls /dev/sd 0 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 0 2016-06-20 22:02 /dev/sda 0 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 1 2016-06-20 22:02 /dev/sda1 0 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 2 2016-06-20 22:02 /dev/sda2
If your are using 'Jessie' the memory will be automatically mounted. Check with df; if this is the case you may not need the next few steps.
Explore the SD finding which partitions are ok and which one are damaged. using fdisk /dev/sda1'
fdisk -l /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 28.8 GiB, 30908350464 bytes, 60367872 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x6f92008e Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sda1 8192 131071 122880 60M c W95 FAT32 (LBA) /dev/sda2 131072 2658303 2527232 1.2G 83 Linux
The configuration will be different if you started with NOOBS.
If you reach this point and no hard sector failure you are in good shape to continue.
In this case you have two partitions, /dev/sda1, type FAT32, the boot partition and /dev/sda2 type Linux. (yours may be different)
mkdir /mnt/sda1 mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
Check the content with ls /mnt/sda1 and compare the listing with your (new) running unit: should be the same content than ls /boot. If not the case, just copy the missing files.
If you have data to recover, mount the 'linux' partition, replacing 'sda1' by 'sdb2' and follow the previous mount procedure. Then, you can scout and recover your old files copying them to your running system.
About the blinks: the green light also blinks when the SD card is active. Default green led use is [mmc0]:
cat /sys/class/leds/led0/trigger none [mmc0] timer oneshot heartbeat backlight gpio cpu0 cpu1 cpu2 cpu3 default-on input rfkill0 phy0rx phy0tx phy0assoc phy0radio
Boot blinks and other useful info are described here, but some information is deprecated.
pd: sudo omitted for brevity.
