Pi-Top Boot Issues with Current Pi-OS, but Other OS (Sirius, Raspbian) Work Fine

pi-top [4]
#1

Good day,

I am currently facing an issue with my more than 50 Pi-Tops, where two devices suddenly won’t boot with the current Pi-OS anymore. These devices used to work flawlessly for years. To be more specific, they show the boot logo on the OLED display. On the HDMI output, the screen goes gray, then black, but no Pi-Top logo appears, and nothing else happens. There’s no access to the storage medium, no further activity. The device doesn’t shut down; it just keeps running while the display continuously shows a black screen.

Here’s what I’ve tested so far, none of which made any difference:

  • Different USB sticks (ranging from 16 GB to 128 GB, including SSDs)
  • SD cards (ranging from 8 GB to 64 GB)
  • Different software for flashing (Raspberry Pi Imager and Balena Etcher)
  • Different bootloaders (I tried bootloaders from every year available on the official Raspberry Pi GitHub repository)
  • Different Pi-Top-OS versions, all releases I could find, roughly the last five versions
  • Different Pi-Top cases (even tried running without the case)

None of these approaches worked. However, if I use the current or any other 32-bit or 64-bit version of Raspbian, it boots just fine and runs perfectly without any issues. The same applies when I use Pi-Top Sirius—everything works without problems.

What’s strange about Sirius, though, is that every time it boots, it claims the bootloader needs to be updated and that there are software updates available. When I update the bootloader, the system restarts, but the bootloader remains the same, and it keeps prompting for an update. This happens even if I’ve already installed the latest or an older bootloader. The software it constantly tries to update is “Code,” and no matter how often I update it, it prompts for the same update after every reboot.

For now, I’ve swapped the Raspberry Pi boards in the two Pi-Top cases, and the new ones boot just fine with the old cases and USB sticks.

I’m running out of ideas at this point. Does anyone have any suggestions on what else I could try? Alternatively, these two Raspberry Pis will just become “regular” Raspberry Pis and won’t get Pi-Top cases anymore. I still have around 10 Pi-Top DIY cases and would really like to use them.

Have a nice day!
Best regards,
Knorbert

#2

hi @Knorbert,

if I understood correctly, only 2 devices out of the 50 have this boot issue; what happens if you try inserting the SD card of one of the devices that works into the ones that don’t boot?

The behavior you describe where on Sirius it says that it needs to update the bootloader happens on these 2 units or on all of them? What happens if you try to manually update the packages? In a terminal, run sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade -y; it’d be great if you could share the output of this command with us.

It’d also be interesting to learn about the bootloader configuration on these units; we modify a few parameters for the pi-top to work properly. Could you please run vcgencmd bootloader_version && vcgencmd bootloader_config in a terminal and share the output with us?

Do you perform any changes to the config.txt or cmdline.txt files from the boot partition on the pi-topOS SD card?

Finally, could you share the output of the command mount?

The answer to these questions should help us to identify the issue with these units.