RasPi stopped working, booting only with HDMI connected

[ghost]

Hi all together,

I have a problem with my RasPi, Model B, Rev. 2. After a few weeks of normal behaviour it suddenly stopped working properly.
I was using it in headless mode, only powersupply and ethernet were connected, I controlled it via SSH. My image is Raspbian wheezy 2013-07-26 on a SanDisk Ultra SDHC 8GB class 10, which is reported to work without problems and has been working for the last weeks.
Now, when I plug in power, only the red PWR led is on while the green ACT led glows fainty. The system will not boot up.
When I connect my RasPi and my TV via HDMI it boots up normal.
I already changed the sdcard and power supply. Voltages between TP1 and TP2 are ok (5.25V when halted, 5.00V when booted up), also the polyfuse F3 shows no resistance.
After searching the net for suggestions, I did an update of the whole system via rpi-update and apt-get update & apt-get upgrade but nothing changed. Also adding the lines boot_delay=1 and force_hdmi_hotplug=1 to /boot/config.txt had no effect. Sometimes it boots up without HDMI connected, but mostly it doesn't.

I've made a video of this behaviour, you can watch it here: http://youtu.be/DihjbOyrTj4

If you have another suggestion, please let me know.

Thanks, regards ChemDroid

[ghollingworth]

The video is private, can't look at it...

Try pressing the SD card contacts against the Pi PCB, sometimes you end up with bad connections due to slightly damaged cards or the SD connector.

If you plug the card into a windows PC you should be able to see the files in the first partition... Can you confirm there is a file called bootrom.bin in there?

Gorodn

[ghost]

The video should be working now!
All files are present, the only difference between boot or not boot is HDMI connected or not, as you can see in the video.

[ghollingworth]

OK,

I see what you mean! So one question is whether the problem is due to grounding of the supply for some reason. One thing the HDMI cable does is provide a path to earth for the supply... I'm wondering whether this is because of a supply problem or a micro USB problem...

Check that it doesn't change at all when you push the SD card pins against the PCB...

What about plugging the USB power from the TV (lots of HDMI TVs have USB power output...) then you'll know the grounding is correct... Also try just touching the ground to the pi shield (i.e. just touch the metal together not the signals)

Gordon

[ghost]

Pushing the SD card against the pins has no effect.
I plugged the USB power from my TV into the Pi, no boot. I also connected a GND-GPIO and the metal of HDMI- and Ethernet-port to the ground of the socket, where my power supply is plugged in to ground it directly, but that had no effect, too.

[ghollingworth]

Can you try swapping out bits of the hardware? i.e. try with a different HDMI TV, a different SD card, different Raspberry Pi (whatever combinations you have available)

This will at least narrow it down to one particular device causing the problem. What you are seeing is the BCM2835 failing to load and run the bootcode.bin from the SDCard (that's the bit that initially turns on the green LED) and therefore it looks like it's most likely a problem with the first stage booting... I can do some diagnosis to understand what is going wrong but only once I get it here at Pi Towers and therefore I need to understand what combination of HDTV, Pi and SD card is required to reproduce the problem

Gordon

[ghost]

I checked all combinations that are available: 4 different SD cards, 2 different HDMI TVs, different USB power supplies (2x 5V 1A, 1x TV-USB) but I don't have a second RasPi, so I can't check that.

Results: Device only boots when HDMI is connected to any TV. After booting it this way, it sometimes also boots without HDMI, but then suddenly doesn't again. The same behaviour as shown in the video.

[hilndr44]

I have the same issue. Did you ever find a solution?

[ghost]

No, not really. I called the distributor and got a new one which is working without problems. Seems it was a technical issue with only this device.

[hilndr44]

Mine turned out to be a combination of the power supply, and still having a Logitech C210 webcam attached to the USB port. A new (2A) power supply fixed the problem. Still not sure why having an HDMI connected makes it work, though. In my case at least, ghollingworth might be right about a grounding issue (i.e. the HDMI cable might provide enough grounding to improve the characteristics of the cheap 1A power supply).

[pierremoreau]

I just experienced the same issue today as I upgraded my Pi and modified the default cmdline.txt. Adding back rootwait solved it.
NB: I had the issue on two different Pis, one of them was quite unused.

[BlitzKraft]

I have the exact same issue. I tried it with different USB cords and powersupplies, but it only boots if and only if the HDMI is connected.

I am using Raspi 3, with a Sandisk 8 GB card, 2016-03-18 Jessie.

However this forum post points out that this issue is caused by a bad grounding on the power supply. But that solution didn't work for me.

I tried a different power supply, and powering it through the USB port on my computer. In each case it booted only if the HDMI is connected.

EDIT: I uncommented and changed the line to hdmi_force_hotplug=0 in /boot/config.txt and it is all fine now.

[pboos]

I am experiencing the same problem. hdmi_force_hotplug seems not to work either for me :(. Neither setting it to 0 nor 1 works. As well it seems that the red led is lighting up when booting without hdmi connected.

[bitkill]

Same problem here. latest fw using rpi-update.
System only boots connected to hdmi monitor.

hdmi_force_hotplug=0 in /boot/config.txt does not work

[ColinK-at-github]

As with the people above I also experienced this problem. I have had this Raspberry Pi for a couple of years now but just hadn't gotten around to it until now. I believe my pi is a model 2 but don't know for sure. I installed the latest version of raspian-jessie (2017-01-11).

Someone asked whether just touching the cable to the HDMI port helped. In my case it did not. The HDMI port actually had to be connected to the TV in order for the pi to boot. Once booted the HDMI cable could then be removed and everything would continue to work fine.

1. Ran rpi-update (went from 4.4.34 to 4.9.y)
   Power recycle
   No Go

2. Tried adding hdmi_force_hotplug=0 in /boot/config.txt
   Power recycle
   No Go

3. Looked at adding rootwait to /boot/cmdline.txt but noticed that there is a typo in the original file. rootwait was specified as roouwait. I changed roouwait to rootwait.
   Power recycle
   SUCCESS!!!!
   I tried three or four times and everytime it worked!!

Don't know if this will work for everyone but in my case correcting the typo was the key (or perhaps a combination of the above I suppose).

Hope this helps someone else too.

Cheers,
./Colin

[nplanel]

adding hdmi_force_hotplug=1 in /boot/config.txt will fix this issue on RPI 3B+

[Geertiebear]

@nplanel that fixed it for me, thank you very much!

[hbarnard]

Thanks for all the comments. I've had this on one particular Pi Zero W. I've got rootwait and hdmi_force_hotplug=0 on the system. But what seemed to work was changing the power supply to a new white 'official' and making sure that the micro-USB for the power was firmly in the socket.

[mmahut]

Having the same issue, both rootwait nor hdmi_force_hotplug=0 are fixing the issue.

[JamesH65]

Try hdmi_force_hotplug=1 ??

What device are you using?

[mmahut]

Try hdmi_force_hotplug=1 ??

Tried it, but I have the same problem.

What device are you using?

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+

[JamesH65]

And which OS? Anything else unusual about your setup?

[rudism]

This problem just surfaced on my 3 B+ today after a firmware upgrade via the package manager on Arch Linux ARM, and hdmi_force_hotplug=1 in the config.txt fixed it for me.

[paulbastian]

I can confirm the last post. Installing ArchLinux ARM intially works headless, after the first pacman update, it only boots with HDMI cable connected. hdmi_force_hotplug=1 then fixes the problem

[popcornmix]

@paulbastian this should have been fixed with raspberrypi/linux#4547 and be present in latest RPiOS updates.
ArchLinux isn't something we directly support, so I'll Ieave it to someone who knows to say whether this commit is present.