no video after dist-upgrade

[romansky]

After running apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade (july 2012 to the latest), the system came up with no video at all. Everything else seems to be working as I can ssh in and manage everything in a headless fashion from my lan.

In the process of the dist-upgrade, given the choice, I elected to keep the same raspi-config settings (the default settings). Everything worked after rebooting including hdmi video. But after a power-down reset, video was gone.

The system has been running 24/7 rock stable for almost a month with the July version.

This is a version 2 pi, with 512MB ram. I have 4.91v between tp1 & tp2. I don't have another hdmi monitor/tv or (at the moment) another working SD card, so it's hard to bisect this problem (Is it the monitor; the pi, or the upgrade on the card?).

I tried to re-run the dist-upgrade, but the system takes a look and appears to determine that I have the latest version and refuses to re-install.

I've been trying to get another card working by following precisely the instructions in the manual for preparing the card with 'dd' under linux. I've downloaded the latest image and it passes the sha test. It appears that an image is being written to the card as I get a report of:
462+1 record in; 462+1 records out; 1,939,865,600 bytes written.
In the end, the new card does not show any signs of life at all: no blinking lights on the pi, just the red power light. I don't have a lot of experience with SD cards, but I have used 'dd' successfully in the past.

I think if I can get the new card running I will have made some headway. Is there someone that is willing to work with me on that either on or off list?

Of course, any other suggestions would be welcome.

Thanks,
jerome

[Spid]

Is this Raspbian Armel or Bodhi Armel or Debian Squeeze Armel ?

Usually it is

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
sync
reboot

The later version of Raspbian and Bodhi are based of ARMHF and not Armel

[romansky]

I don't understand the question... I'm using deb wheezy as the OS.

I did indeed follow the sequence you outlined in your post when putting the image on the card

jerome

[drgeoff]

You are not by any chance using a 2 Gbyte SD card? 1,939,865,600 bytes is awfully close to, and may even exceed, what some 2 Gbyte SD cards actually have to offer.

[romansky]

Nope... it's a Kingston 4 GB SDHC. That said... reading other posts, folks have had problems with Kingston 8 Gig cards... so I just bought a Sandisk card to see if it's a compatibility prob.
j.

[Spid]

I don't understand the question... I'm using deb wheezy as the OS.

I did indeed follow the sequence you outlined in your post when putting the image on the card

jerome

I was asking what version of Linux you had it is either ARMEL or ARMHF they use different repositories ! so maybe you are linked to the wrong mirror ?


So am I right in persuming you are using the Soft-float Debian “wheezy” (This image is identical to the Raspbian “wheezy” image, but uses the slower soft-float ABI. It is only intended for use with software such as the Oracle JVM which does not yet support the hard-float ABI used by Raspbian.)

http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads

[romansky]

No I believe the image was the 'hard' wheezy. But the good nooze is that the Video is back. Somewhere in process of doing dist-upgrade, I must have made a wrong choice.

When I uncommented the line in /boot/config.txt:

# uncomment if hdmi display is not detected and composite is being output
hdmi_force_hotplug=1

the video started working again after a reboot.

That said, I still can't burn another image to an SDHC card. I bought a Sandisk 8 gig card, and went through the procedure again, and nothing: It just sits there with a big red light. No activity whatsover. something I'm doing is just plain wrong.

At least there's just one problem left <g>.

jerome

[drgeoff]

That said, I still can't burn another image to an SDHC card. I bought a Sandisk 8 gig card, and went through the procedure again, and nothing: It just sits there with a big red light. No activity whatsover. something I'm doing is just plain wrong.

You have a Linux PC. You should be able to see the files in both partitions of the SDHC card.

[romansky]

This is what fdisk has to say about /dev/sde1 which I attempted to write the OS to:

Disk /dev/sde1: 7944 MB, 7944011776 bytes
245 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1021 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 15190 * 512 = 7777280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00017b69

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sde1p1 1 9 57344 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(0, 130, 3) logical=(0, 132, 9)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(7, 165, 30) logical=(8, 21, 58)
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sde1p2 9 250 1832960 83 Linux
Partition 2 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(7, 165, 31) logical=(8, 21, 59)
Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(235, 214, 43) logical=(249, 104, 42)
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.

But what to make of this?
j.

[rpdom]

Are you saying that you wrote the image to /dev/sde1?

That's not what the instructions say to do (unless they are wrong, and I would expect that to have been reported by now).

You should be writing to /dev/sde (without the 1). This is the "whole disk" or card, in ths case. The image contains all the disk data including the partition table and the contents of /dev/sde1 and /dev/sde2 (in your case).

[romansky]

Are you saying that you wrote the image to /dev/sde1?

That's not what the instructions say to do (unless they are wrong, and I would expect that to have been reported by now).

You should be writing to /dev/sde (without the 1). This is the "whole disk" or card, in ths case. The image contains all the disk data including the partition table and the contents of /dev/sde1 and /dev/sde2 (in your case).

You are correct... I actually discovered that a few minutes before I read your post!! It's tough doing this stuff at age 75 <g>, I was smarter some years ago!

Induction on two pieces of data: It appears that with the Dec. 16th version of wheezy, the video does not come up in HDMI mode by default as it did in the July version. This was true of the downloaded image that I just burned and also of the dist-upgrade. I'd be interested if others find the same. FWIW, as I said above, I had to edit /boot/config.txt to wit:

# uncomment if hdmi display is not detected and composite is being output
hdmi_force_hotplug=1

That's it, I thank all who took the trouble to help an old fool!
jerome

[efflandt]

I don't think I had any problem automatically recognizing my HDMI (1080p) video with Oct or Dec Raspbian images and dist-upgrades until after doing rpi-update sometime this month (which I need to prevent random ethernet and USB stoppage). Then "no signal" for HDMI (and tvservice -s showed composite spec's) until I uncommented hdmi_force_hotplug=1 via ssh and rebooted.

[romansky]

Thanks for that... makes one wonder what you would do if you didn't have a network, doesn't it?
j.