Original Pi-Top [1] won't boot Sirius

pi-top [1] + pi-topCEED
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#1

I have an original Pi-Top [1] with a hub mk 1, Raspberry Pi 3B+ and the old version of the speaker module. I installed the ‘2020-05-18’ version of Pi-TopOS Sirius on my 16GB SD card, and it doesn’t seem to boot at all.

The first time I attempted to boot, I saw the usual rainbow boot screen, followed by a teal-colored “Pi-Top” logo, then the power light blinked for a few seconds, then the power light faded from on to off, and the laptop shut itself down. On subsequent attempts, it did exactly the same thing except it didn’t show the Pi-Top logo.

I’m pretty sure the hardware is OK because regular Raspberry Pi OS boots just fine, but I can’t use that since it doesn’t let me adjust the screen brightness. I was hoping to put Polaris back on to have something usable, but it looks like it’s not available at all anymore?

Is there anything we can try to get Sirius working on my Pi-Top [1]?

#2

Update: I stumbled on the article in the knowledge base “Using pi-top Hardware with Raspberry Pi OS” and decided to give it a try. After following the instructions and rebooting the system, it didn’t seem to have improved anything. No battery display on the taskbar even though I double-checked they are technically added. I forgot to try the brightness buttons.

So I did another sudo apt update and upgrade and… Now it won’t boot at all, much in the same manner as the full Sirius installation. It gets farther (the Raspberry Pi OS splash screen shows up for a few seconds), but it never fully boots, shutting itself down instead. Whatever causes this bug seems to be in common with both the full Sirius install and the software repository with the add-ons for Raspberry Pi OS :frowning_face:

#3

Update 2: After a bit of searching, I was able to find an old 2018 copy of Pi-Top OS Polaris, an operating system I know for a fact used to work properly. I flashed it to an SD card to see if an old known-good setup would still work…

I got halfway through the first boot setup dialogs, and then it spontaneously shut down again! I was quite surprised. After that, it shut down during every attempted boot-up just as the other OS versions did. However, I did notice a helpful difference: While it was shutting down it actually showed terminal messages that seemed to indicate that something was sending a message to the Raspberry Pi telling it to shut down.

In conclusion, I’ve changed my mind and I now think this Pi-Top really does have a hardware problem. I think something (maybe in the hub?) is spamming the Pi with shutdown messages, so any OS with working Pi-Top drivers will shut down as soon as it loads the drivers. Stock Raspberry Pi OS doesn’t have the drivers, so it never listens to the shutdown signals. Unfortunately I don’t have the know-how to dig any deeper, so I’m going to submit a support ticket.

I see people are viewing this topic even though no one’s responding, so unless someone tells me to stop I’ll try to keep posting updates in the hopes that it benefits someone in the future.

#4

Can you please post the link to the 2018 Pi-Tops OS Polaris that you found

#5

You could try seeing whether this works for you Battery Info / Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy) Pi-top [1] + RPi 3 Model B v1.2 ?

And welcome to the pi-top forum! Hope you enjoy using yours.