RPi 3B No boot from flashed SDCard - Pi functions normally with other OS

Installation
1

The RP3B is not coming alive on either image.
Pi feedback: Red LED is on (means it is having power). In the very first 3 seconds light activity on the Green LED (one long and two very short flashes).
Furthe activity. No Ethernet connect LED.
I connected my monitor to find out what is going on, and after boot the screen remains black (no colorfull boot image on the screen)

What I have tried:

I have tried 3 different SDCards. The size of these cards 2x 32 Gb and one 4Gb
Several SDCard flashing, where I used two sources:

  • Raspberry Pi Imager v1.8.5 (down loaded this fresh from internet)
  • In this interface selected:
    • Device : Raspberry 3
    • Operating System : Other (home Automation) → Home Assistants → Home Assistant os 13.1 (RPi3)
  • Storage → a formatted SDCARD 32 Gb

The other source is coming from GitHub. I have the link from the HA site under Raspberry Pi Install. This is image should be for the RP3

https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/13.1/haos_rpi3-64-13.1.img.xz

With every attempt the Pi did not boot.

I Flashed other OS’s on my SD Card and the Pi was booting up normally. Imediatly with a colorful screen then the installation followed.
The Pi is a 3B version.

It was running my audio player Volumio on it in the early days of Volumio. I upgraded that sysatem towards a Pi4. that’s why I have this Pi3B laying on the shelf. There is a good powersupply is connected. (5V 3 Amps)

So please you tell me what is needed to bring HA alive!!
There must be something wrong with the image.

I seriously wanted to explore HA, after some reading other good info
Getting stuck like this, makes further troubleshooting no sense…

I will await who comes up with good advice, else moving back towards OH or an Official KNX Visualisation box. Luckily my KNX system is running very stable and trouble free for years.

I just want to have the extra visualisation layer on top of the KNX system.
And addign very little extra locic and most of all I like to write Tempurature control values towards a MariaDB table for analysis. That’s it.

Awating for support.

1 Like
2

Try with OS 12.1

3

Hi Francis, 12.1 that’s a way back. several released in between. Do you have the GitHub url? I foun don Github some release notes of 12.1, not the down load link.

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https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/12.1/haos_rpi3-64-12.1.img.xz

5

Hello Francis, thanks. I dowloaded. Flashed two SDCards. Smae symtom. Red LED on. No sign of life on the Green LED. The Pi is now running OpenHab. Did a good boot on that, the installation took a while but is is running. So I will explore OH.
In the mean time awaiting support from this forum to get HA running.

6

I spend this afternoon time on trouble shooting this boot issue on the RPi3B.

After several attempts no succes yet with this Pi.
She simply does not want to boot :slight_smile:

What I have tried:

  • I down loaded HA OS 12.1. Flashed it on 32 SDCard. I repeated this step several times. Each time with slightly different tweaks, like Formatting the SD with Windows 11 prior flashing with Balena Etcher. Or … use Raspberry Pi Imager and selected in there “Erase SDCard”. I used Balena Etcher to flash the card, as well used the Rapberry Pi Imager Tool and selected the option to Flash an external image.
    I did same steps with the latest image 13.1.

The symptoms are: Power connected, Red Power LED comes ON, the Green LED flashed 1x long and two (2) times very short.

I made tweaks in the config.txt.
By default, the HA config.txt is listing several config options, of which most are commented out. One particular config item is the kernel=u-boot.bin
My RPi3B is booting on other OS systems. I looked into the config.txt of the other OS and these have in the config.txt a kernel reference → kernel=kernel7.img

I tried some changes in config.txt and dropped kernel7.img on the SD Card.

With this configuration, during the boot, Red LED comes ON, the green LED showed → two green flashes. Further no other progress. No LED lights on the Ethernet port.

Other tweaks in config.text:

I tried with comment out arm_64bit=1

There is a section [pi4]
I comment out:
arm_boost=1

Each time some small changes in the config.txt and the CmdConfig.txt.

I grabbed another power supply (20 Watt). Tried that.
Even connected a stabilized Lab DC 30V - # Amps Power supply. Tuned it for 5,3 Volts and with current limiter set on 700mAmps.

After these attempts, no succes … yet

It became Friday afternoon and … it realized ‘time for a beer”
I did one more step, slided the SD with “OpenHab setup” back in the Pi and fired her up and …. “boom !”
Back online with OH.

I really hope some one can assist. In the end … this must be easy to fix.
Cheers

7

Disclaimer i have not played with HAOS on a pi for a while, but something i remember, not sure where from. When flashing using pi imager it asks for network and user name stuff, dont add these as it wont work.

You might already know this but it could be useful to.someone.

8

I have a decent build server that is running TrueNAS with 10 drives, 32Gb RAM and ZFS file system. This machine is accessible on LAN only.
TrueNas facilitates Virual Machines.
I have one VM running Ubuntu Server 24.04.

I could Install HA on this Ubuntu VM.

9

Ok, I did not had these setup questions for internet setup ect. the Pi freezes after 3 seconds.