Pi4 stopped booting from USB

thecheffer

Hi,
I setup Retropie to boot from USB - installing the latest eeprom update.
Worked a treat.
Until I rebooted the pi. The Pi no longer boots unless I have a card in the SD drive.
The boot screen reports
boot: mode SD 0 order 1 retry 3/3 restart 0/-1
SD: card not detected
….
failed to open device: 'sdcard' (cmd 371a0010 status 1fff0001)
insert SD-CARD

There is no mention at all of it even attempting to read the USB.
I've had a hunt around google but not retuned any thing useful. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
P.S - i'm using a USB stick - so shouldn't require any external power and the Pi is powered by the official Pi adapter - 5.1V, 3A

mitu

What's the BOOT_ORDER for the bootloader set-up to ? Check https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2711_bootloader_config.md for the available options, by default - with a recent EEPROM update - it should be 0x4f1 (SD first, USD-MSD 2nd then reboot) - but yours shows that only SD boot is tried.
Make sure you have a fully updated system (sudo apt update && sudo apt -y full-upgrade) and the proper eeprom update - the default EEPROM update channel (stable) will not enable USB boot.

thecheffer

@mitu
Thanks - I’ve been reading up on this today - not near the Pi to test, however, the default you mention is definitely not the behaviour I’m seeing. So I wonder if I have got something odd in here. Also doesn’t explain why this would have changed as booting from USB worked once...
Anyway - I’ll report back.

thecheffer

@thecheffer
Frustrating. I can see the issue but cannot fix it...
So - Mitu - you are correct (i'm pretty sure) - when displaying the contents of Bootloader_config, I have BOOT_ORDER=0x1

However, i'm having no luck following the Pi4 Bootloader Configuration
sudo rpi-eeprom-config pieeprom.bin > bootconf.txt
Resulted in a bash: bootconf.txt access denied message.

I think I've worked around this by:
sudo chmod -R 777 /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader

Now, rerunning the ...pieeprom > bootconf.txt I get
No such file or directory" pieeprom.bin

And indeed, doing an ls on the bootloader directory shows no such file...

thecheffer

@thecheffer
Cant work out if i'm learning or just going round in circles..
To give you a running commentary - I can see there is a /Stable folder in the /Bootloader folder - which has a pieeprom-2020-07-31.bin file.

Extracting from this - I do have Boot_Config=0xf41
(which is the config I want!)

No idea how to get this into the eeprom so I reckon i'm going to bin this install and try a fresh instance of the OS and start from scratch with updating the eeprom…

thecheffer

@thecheffer
Ok.. before I trashed my install - I found and ran the following:
sudo rpi-eeprom-update -d -f /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/stable/pieeprom-2020-07-31.bin

This did the trick.
I'm back booting from USB. Long may it last.

mitu

The EEPROM is outside the OS, so changing the OS wouldn't have helped.
As I said, you'll need to use the stable version to get USB-MSD boot working, by default rpi-eeprom-update will use the critical update version - as you found out in your latest update.