Raspberry Pi Posts (successfully I think) then nothing but a cursor

Question

So the title pretty much says it all.

My Pi goes through the post process successfully with both red and green leds. Then after it appears its going to load the OS it instead just loads a blinking white cursor in the top left corner. I can type stuff in but it doesn't seem to respond to commands.

I am guessing my image got corrupted. It was running just fine and I plugged in an external hard drive. I am guessing that the extra power draw caused it to shut down. If this happened during a write process (which it was doing) it could have corrupted the disk.

This is all purely speculation of course which is why I am on here asking if anyone else has experienced anything like this.

Answer 1

You'd better troubleshoot everything one by one.

1. Disconnect your HDD, it does not matter now
2. Get another SD card, put a fresh image on it and try to boot
3. If unable to boot, try different cards or different OS images
4. If still unsuccessful, get a fresh Raspberry Pi, and try to boot again
5. Once you get your system up and running, you may get USB SD reader to salvage the contents from your previously used SD card
6. When you get everything fixed, you may reconnect your HDD back on

Answer 2

I would highly recommend, that you use a USB hub with external power to connect the HDD. I've seen the same problem by on my RasPi connecting just a wireless mouse and keyboard. Do'nt expect to draw any serious power from the USB connections !!

ScienceTeacher, DK

Answer 3

This happened to me too. When you turn the Raspberry Pi on, does it briefly show the logo with a message the says "To go into reboot mode, press SHIFT"?

If so, press SHIFT then re-choose the OS and press ENTER. Unfortunately, you will lose all your data, but this is how I managed to get through it. I suggest once you have you reset you Raspberry Pi, you save everything to a USB stick or something.

Answer 4

The same thing has happened to me. I pressed Alt - F1 and it went to the console. Then I deleted 1 file, and rebooted it and it went straight to the desktop. Next I changed raspi-config so it would boot to the command line and allow me to log in and enter the startx command to go to the desktop. It worked!