Sometimes boots without mounting external disc

Stuffu

Hi

For a while I have had some issues with my external disc not being recognised. Rebooting usually solves the issue but today something else happened. It didn't boot at all after a reboot. Attached a picture of the boot screen, it just looped that message. Unplugged and tried again and then it worked again. But something is very wrong.

The dmesg log below (from a successful boot and properly mounted external disc) but maybe someone can point out something anyway: https://pastebin.com/tTJg60dn

Also, when it fails to mount the external disc, what also happens every time is that the system hangs during shutdown and never times out, so power needs to be cut to start over. Unfortunately I don't have a log for that or from a failed boot. If needed to pinpoint the issue I'll try to get one!

System used: Raspberry Pi 4 with original power supply. Hardware Retroflag Nespi 4 case, with external ssd. Don't know if this matters but using USB2 since USB3 was really poor performance with the external disc.

Retropie, 4.7.11 built from scratch, running on sd card, no bootloader, also os updated to latest available as of today.

Just to clarify, the setup have been working without any issues until a few weeks ago. I can't recall that I have done any changes to the system recently.

Thanks to anyone who bothers to look through the logs :)

edit: noticed this in the logs if it can have something to do with it.

[    9.074567] FAT-fs (sda1): Volume was not properly unmounted. Some data may be corrupt. Please run fsck.

Stuffu

This made me take a perhaps well needed retropie break :) anyway, reinstalled retropie and suffered other issues like Bluetooth not working etc. decided to ditch the sd card and start over again. I guess the sd had come to the end of its journey. Case closed.

RamenRaiderY95

I realize you have resolved the issue, but I thought I might contribute something.

A lot of people don't realize that the quality of the MicroSD card makes a big difference for running Raspberry Pi operating systems. High-speed is important, with a minimum of Class 10 (I know, newer/faster standards now exist) always being recommended. However, the endurance of the card (or the number of writes/re-writes it can handle) is just as important. There are "high endurance" or "industrial grade" MicroSD cards available that should do a better job than run-of-the-mill MicroSDs with Class 10 ratings and will have a longer life-span.

MicroSD cards were meant for storage, for photos and the like. Running an OS from a MicroSD card causes a lot of heat due to random reads/writes happening almost constantly. For the most part, they weren't designed for this purpose and the extra wear and tear can cause early failure.

Of course, running your OS from a real SSD would be best but that's tricky to get working right on a Pi4 (and probably not worth doing on anything older).