Can't get Occidentalis to boot

[WmK]

I have written Occidentalis with Win32DiskImager to 3 different 4g cards and it never boots up. Just sits at the 4 color screen. I have then written over these cards with Raspbian and they boot fine, so I don't think it's the cards. Any idea what I could be doing wrong? I have downloaded a new Occidentalis each time before writing to the cards. Thanks for any help.

/ Bill

[adafruit]

I have written Occidentalis with Win32DiskImager to 3 different 4g cards and it never boots up. Just sits at the 4 color screen. I have then written over these cards with Raspbian and they boot fine, so I don't think it's the cards. Any idea what I could be doing wrong? I have downloaded a new Occidentalis each time before writing to the cards. Thanks for any help.
/ Bill

hey bill,

are any of the cards the same as the ones we sell in the adafruit store? there was one commenter here who had an issue with a smaller card / different type if i recall correctly. there are thousands and thousands of people running our distro, so it might be a card or write issue from your system (just a guess) - we've not been able to get a card to fail.

thanks,
adafruit support, phil

[WmK]

Hi Phil,

Thanks for the suggestion.
Yes, one card looks like the Dane-Elec you stock, the other two are different SanDisc types. When you get your 4g card back in stock, I'll give it a try. Just scratching my head why Raspbian will boot from these but not Occidentalis.

/ Bill

[Wody]

Hey,
You say you have downloaded the zip file, but did you also verify the integrity with md5 or sha?

If you haven't, It could be that your ISP (or something between you and the file) is caching a faulty copy or causing corruption, and then downloading it again and again makes no difference.

If you have, then sorry, I have no idea, except if you tried different cards, also try a different cardwriter/computer

[WmK]

Wody, Yes, Win32DiskImager confirmed the MD5 hash. I used two different card readers, the last one was Adafruit's USB MicroSD Card Reader (939). Nevertheless, I'll try my old trusty XP machine next while waiting for the new 4G card. Thanks.

[Seb]

Same for me, tested on 2 different cards, a Sandisk 32Gb and a PNY 4Gb, rainbow screen. MD5 hash verified, both cards have been tested successfully with others available distros: Wheezy-raspbian, Archlinux, OpenELEC and Raspbmc.
The only one that give me a rainbow screen at startup is the Occidentalis...

[WmK]

Some success. After 5 different SD cards, I have Occidentalis booting from an 8gb Transcend SDHC class 10. This didn't happen the first time I tried booting from this card, but only after messing around this weekend doing things like turning the power on and off on the power strip a few times after the rainbow screen, walking away for a few hours then trying again. It booted once during those trials, which gave me hope. Today it boots every time, so I'm giving this a qualified success. Since I have more invested in SD cards now than the RasPi itself, I'm not going to try anything else ( unless an update to Occidentalis comes out ). I wish I had something more definite for anyone else having this issue. My only suggestion is don't use 4gb cards for this distro if you're having a problem. / Bill

[WmK]

Ok. Couldn't help myself to dig further and experiments show that Occidentalis is booting consistently when hooked up to HDMI/DVI monitor, but will not get past the rainbow screen when hooked up to composite monitor. Raspbian boots either way.

[WmK]

Occidentalis v0.2 boots from both HDMI and composite video for me now.
/ Bill

[cstratton]

I had severe boot problems on two cards with Occidentalis (would only boot if warm reset with a jumper wire) which were fixed by overwriting the boot partition with a vanilla Raspbian one. (ie, likely a different version than Occidentalis was based on)

[adafruit]

I had severe boot problems on two cards with Occidentalis (would only boot if warm reset with a jumper wire) which were fixed by overwriting the boot partition with a vanilla Raspbian one. (ie, likely a different version than Occidentalis was based on)

it's most likely a bad download (or card) make sure the md5s match after you download...
http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-rasp ... s-v0-dot-2

MD5 of the img itself (not the zip): 4256c0cdad82fa193c5e902143f1ca0e
MD5 of the zip: 43456900352bb8bd8860902167195d83
SHA of image: a609f588bca86694989ab7672badbce423aa89fd
SHA of zip: 5f33ec07a183f336f973f82634f04108f690f5f3

NOTE: Be sure to check the MD5/SHA checksum before uncompressing/burning to your SD – it’s a big file and you can have Pi instability if a few bits are wrong!

cheers,
adafruit support, phil

[Static]

I am having the opposite experience.

I've been able to consistently get the Wheezy Raspberry Debian build to work over HDMI. I have only been able to get the Occidentalis to work over a composite cable. I really want to get Occidentalis to work over HDMI, and I'm more than willing to do trial and error work so that others don't have this problem.

I try to boot the system with the HDMI plugged in, but nothing happens to the HD screen. I've tried different cables and different televisions. Other systems work over the same cable, other video sources work on the televisions.

I do have a couple of caveats.
I'm very inexperienced with command line linux (Although I cut my teeth on computers before GUI's. I'm not scared of the command line, just learning the particulars on linux). I'm hoping to use the RaspPi to learn linux.


I do have a brand new 8GB card (Kingston) still in the wrapper. I still have the Occidentalis SD card, and the Wheezy card.

Is there anything I can do to help? Any way to log what's going on behind the scenes?

[Static]

I've tried 8 different SD cards now (I'm a photographer, I have these things lying around). None of them allow me to go through the initial boot with the HDMI cable set up (Again, the board appears to boot, LED's blinking merrily). Using an RCA video cable, I can get an image and play around with it, but the HDMI doesn't work.

Just now, I tried a fresh install with an 8GB SanDisk Class 10 card. I went through the initial setup, and then did a reboot. Much to my frustration, the display did not come back up (it reports a "No Signal" error when it does not receive a signal). I cycled the display through the various ports, and just for fun stopped on the HDMI port. Lo and behold, the Pi is now outputting to the HDMI port.

The only thing that I did different (I think) is expand the volume to the entire SD card and reboot. I don't know if this helps anyone else. I'm going to continue to post information if I get it, but right now, I'm for bed. I've been awake for way too long.

[VOYAGERUSA]

Ok here is my 2cents had issues on second boot with hdmi cable if i didn't expand the file system on the first boot don't know if is swap space troubles or some such but after hooking to composite it booted and i ran the config file set all the stuff, expanded the size on sd card and then rebooted,put the hdmi cable in and went right to desktop been there ever since.No other issues on the 256 pi model.
VOYAGERUSA