Solved: Won't re-boot after first boot

Divarin

Okay the title is a little lie because it turned out this wasn't what was actually happening but it appeared (at the time) that the PI wasn't booting and a lot of other people were having this issue.

Like others I have experienced an issue where, on the first boot-up after writing your SD-card it works but then you shut down, power cycle, and start up and your screen is blank with no signal. Many people say "check your power supply". I highly doubted it was the power supply because if I were to pop in raspbian it would boot up fine. If I were to re-write the SD card it would boot up fine. In-fact if I were to pop the card into a PC and copy over the original cmdline.txt file it would then start up fine. Nevertheless with nothing else to try I ordered a 2.5a power supply and as I suspected the behavior was unchanged.

I even tried swapping PI's (PI-2 for a PI-3), same behavior.

For me the issue wasn't that the PI wasn't booting up but that the screen wasn't coming alive. I don't have very many displays at my disposal that work with HDMI natively. In-fact I only have a projector (I found out the PI would boot-up all day long as long as it's connected to the projector). Anything else I might plug my PI into will need some sort of adapter. For the setup and testing of RetroPIE I purchased this HDMI to VGA adapter: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00879DM56/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

So, I started thinking that this adapter must be the culprit and it was but that doesn't mean I can't use it. When I started taking a closer look at the adapter I discovered a micro-usb which was not mentioned in any of the paperwork with the adapter (unless it was and I overlooked it). The adapter didn't come with a power supply but I assumed this was intended for situations where the device the adapter is plugged into doesn't put out enough power; you could then add your own power supply for the adapter.

So, taking one of my 2.0a (original PI) power adapters I plugged that in and it works but only if you follow this power-up sequence:

No power to PI or adapter
Power up adapter first, no power to PI, wait a second or two (probably caps charging)
Power up PI

When you power down if you leave the adapter powered up that will keep the PI going so you'll need to power off the adapter as well to fully kill the power.

So, for me I can continue to use the adapter but I might want to use a switched power strip. Either that or just get a screen which natively supports HDMI.

I hope this helps someone else with a similar setup because I wasn't seeing any real answers out there other than "check your power supply, it needs to be 2.5a!!" never did I see a response stating "yes, that was it" or "no, it was something else" so I have no idea if those people ever found a solution or they just gave up.

Lagauffre

@divarin Thanks a lot for this ! I thought I was getting crazy, I reformatted, reinstalled 3 different SD cards because of it. I was trying to build Wermy's card reader when it happened, so I thought it was the culprit and took apart the whole thing... All of that because I was using a vga adapter. It worked on first attempt when I connected on my HD TV.
So thanks a lot for posting this !

lasniski

@Lagauffre
I️ have been struggling for weeks yuh this. I️ also bought a different HDMI adapter: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/ya?ac=bia&ref=yo_pop_mb_bia&reorder_params=B01F1SZB2W%2C112-0615068-3893811
Once I️ read your post I️ tried hooking up the pi to my tv. Shutdown, reboot. Shutdown reboot. No issues. Thank you posting this, I’ll bet this is why a lot of people are having the same issue!