A few days ago I went to boot my trusty Raspberry Pi model 3b (I know, it's a bit outdated) after quite a few months of not using it, and I was going to connect to it in a headless configuration, but I noticed that I couldn't connect. I had to get some other stuff done, so I only came back to it today to investigate. It booted like normal, and it went through all of the normal screens and processes of a boot. I thought that all is well, until I noticed that instead of showing me the Raspbian desktop, I got a blinking cursor. It is not a command line, and I can't type anything in. The green light is also fairly active, blinking every few seconds. Interestingly, while I was off writing this post, the green light has stopped blinking and the flashing cursor has disappeared. It seems similar to this post https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/112628/rasberry-pi-black-screen-after-boot-wth-blinking-cursor.

If I can remember correctly, the last few times I was using it, I could not boot into it properly, but only VNC or SSH into the Pi.

I know that I could probably just format the card and flash Raspbian or NOOBS onto it. It is not necessary but it would be nice if there were any way that I can at least recover some of my old files.

Raspberry Pi 3b  
Raspbian Jessie  
8GB micro SD card

For any reading/writing to the micro SD card, I have a both a Windows and an Ubuntu machine.

Thanks in advance.


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*I will check back here often, and I will edit my post to include any required information*


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