White screen after Retropie logo - after overclocking

[xxghostbusterxx]

PI3 - Retropie 3.8 - PS3 Controller Wireless - Keyboard

OK, so I tried to overclock my pi3 by changing four lines of the config file that was recommended in a youtube video guide - really simple stuff. Now I have the white screen of death. I have placed the original config file back and still i get this problem. When booting there are some lines of text that mention systemd-fsck[101]: Pass 1 checking inodes. Is there hope to get this working again or should i start again?

[backstander]

Hey @xxghostbusterxx

I think you should be able to put your SDcard into another (Win, Mac, Linux) computer to make changes to /boot/config.txt (as long as the SDcard data isn't corrupt). I believe there is a small FAT32 partition with only /boot/ on your SDcard that Win & Mac can read. Linux should be able to read both partitions.

Also I've read somewhere that while booting your Raspberry Pi holding down the Shift key will disable any overclock settings but I've never got this to work for me.

[xxghostbusterxx]

@backstander thanks, I have placed the original config backup back to the sd card with no change - shift on startup has no affect. I don't think there is a way out of this, so I will look into the process of reinstalling everything and never , ever, over clock again.☹️

[simonster]

Hi @xxghostbusterxx

In my previous experience, a WSOD (white screen of death) in Emulation Station is caused by too low a GPU Memory. You didn't specify which guide you followed, is there a chance that you changed this when trying to overclock the pi?

If you exit to the prompt by pressing F4 (even in a WSOD) and run:

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

modify the gpu_mem line to:

gpu_mem= 256

Then press Ctrl+X, Y (to save the file)

then type:

sudo shutdown -r -t 0 now

This should reboot the pie. If you still get a White Screen of Death, try changing to a different theme in emulationstation (press start on the controller, the menu will still appear).