Hardware failure - Pi3 and SD card died at the same time

Hardware
1

Hi guys,

I have another topic opened in Configuration category - something happened to my Home Assistant and I was not able to restore my snapshot from RPI3 to RPI4. Luckily I have copies of all my configs and SD card readable to access everything from the card reader.

What I am trying to understand now - what is actually happened to my hardware.

Raspberry PI:

  1. My RPI3 is not booting, power supply is OK (Official and recommended by RPI). Power red LED is on, but green LED is blinking couple of times on boot and that’s it.
  2. LAN LEDs are not ON, so it’s not getting any IP addresses.
  3. Inserting new flashed SD card doesn’t help
  4. Connected monitor over HDMI to see if there is anything on the screen, but it stays black.

SD card:

  1. It is readable (64Gb Samsung) - I extracted all files using card reader.
  2. It is not writable anymore - tried formatting/reflashing on different devices and it says write protected. Looks like the card is corrupted.

What I think happened - SD card got corrupted, was readable but write protected - PI tried to write… write… write… and died. A bit weird, but could be just a coincidence and bad luck.

As I said - I already migrated to PI4+SD (thinking of SSD when it becomes possible), just trying to find a potential reason of what happened, as the whole house was down for 2 days, wife wasn’t happy.

2

Happy wife = happy life.

Therefore, get a NUC or similar device

:slight_smile:

1 Like
3

Pi4 and SSD has been fine for me for a long time, though as a stop gap you still need to run the boot partition off the SD card. Looking at the Pi4 firmware notes, there were mentions on starting on the native USB boot support so hopefully not far off.

4

Try plugging in the HDMI monitor before applying power. It is probably not recognising the monitor if it is not there on boot.

It is possible, but highly unlikely that your pi has fried itself. They are pretty robust (unlike the sd card).

5

This literally just happened to me, so I am taking the opportunity to rebuild the system using the most current HA version in Docker on QNap device. You lose some of the nice stuff from Hassio, but get a bit more control.

Plus it’s more reliable. With watchtower and portainer Docker is pretty easy to configure and use. It’s also much faster.