Thank you so much for your reply.We are hundred of thousands of happy users... Maybe millions, I don't know...
I have 10 Pis, from 3b from 5... all working perfectly fine...
I see here or there there can be a faulty RPI (like any industrial make) but not all of them like you describe...
Here are advices I have read hundreds of times on this forum :
- remove all hats, extensions from your board and start a fresh install again. When successful reinstall your add-ons.
- upgrading from bookworm to trixie is not the recommended way. It works though... Always prefer a fresh install after backuping your data.
- always create a backup image of your system before trying to apply upgrades or modifications. This way you can revert to previous step if it fails...
- in case you still have problems, there is a way to boot "in a sort of repair mode" without any sdcard inserted to reset the eeprom. It is documented in this forum too (for RPI4 and 5 if I recall correctly).
I can feel your frustration and I'm very sorry for you but I can also feel between the lines that you probably did not follow any of the basic recommendations given everywhere... Don't do things before reading about doing those things... I see it's your 1st post. Have you ever considered asking for advices, good practices BEFORE doing something with your Pis ? That's how we can all learn and avoid traps...
Yesterday I tried one more thing and finally got all PIEs up and running. My mistake was that I had it working fine with the PIE 4, but I was trying to go command-line and headless with a UART and the UART was not responding. I was trying to avoid hooking it up to an HDMI monitor.
Once I started connecting the HDMI monitor — even though my intention is to go headless — I started seeing activity and the microSD booted completely. Before that, it seemed like it was just stuck in a loop for some odd reason.Thank you so much for your reply.
Yesterday I tried one more thing and finally got all PIEs up and running. My mistake was that I had it working fine with the PIE 4, but I was trying to go command-line and headless with a UART and the UART was not responding. I was trying to avoid hooking it up to an HDMI monitor.
Once I started connecting the HDMI monitor — even though my intention is to go headless — I started seeing activity and the microSD booted completely. Before that, it seemed like it was just stuck in a loop for some odd reason.Thank you so much for your reply.
Yesterday I tried one more thing and finally got all PIEs up and running. My mistake was that I had it working fine with the PIE 4, but I was trying to go command-line and headless with a UART and the UART was not responding. I was trying to avoid hooking it up to an HDMI monitor.
Once I started connecting the HDMI monitor — even though my intention is to go headless — I started seeing activity and the microSD booted completely. Before that, it seemed like it was just stuck in a loop for some odd reason. I've been reading everything and anything—recommendations about the Pi, maybe even too many Pi options—but there's been some contradictory information. Bookworm and my Pi 4 have caused problems a couple of times because of some changes.
I did have a configuration set up that worked and I could boot into it, but this time it wasn't working for some odd reason. It seems I may need to edit the config and set a proper flag, since it's not active by default.
I'm used to troubleshooting and debugging from the command line first, not starting with graphics. Again, I really thank you for your engagement and your feedback.
Statistics: Posted by sparkedmatter — Mon Oct 20, 2025 8:50 pm