Fix Raspberry Pi 2 boot issue after rpi-update

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on December 1st 2015 - Listed in Linux

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In our office, a little Raspberry Pi is responsible for displaying current graphs and monitoring data via its HDMI output to a TV screen. It's been running for months without interruption and I thought I'd run an update on it.

As Raspberry is running on Raspbian, which is based on Debian, there's of course the well known apt-get update/apt-get upgrade commands. I then followed these commands with "rpi-update" -> big mistake.

After rpi-update finished, it's output advised me to reboot the system. Which I did. And the Pi didn't boot anymore. Instead just the red power led was on but nothing else worked. Turns out, rpi-update is bad and shouldn't be launched. Great. Now that I learn that afterwards it's too late.

But not all hope is lost. I removed the microSD card and inserted it into my notebook which I had booted with grml64. The microSD card was detected as /dev/mmcblk0 as seen in dmesg:

[   49.005314] mmc0: new high speed SDHC card at address 59b4
[   49.023019] mmcblk0: mmc0:59b4 00000 7.35 GiB
[   49.025442]  mmcblk0: p1 p2 < p5 p6 > p3

With fdisk some more details can be seen:

fdisk -l /dev/mmcblk0

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 7.4 GiB, 7892631552 bytes, 15415296 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (locical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x1660e00a

Device          Boot   Start          End       Sectors       Size    Id    Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1         8192       1673828       1665637     813.3M     c    W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2      1679360      15333375      13654016       6.5G     5    Extended
/dev/mmcblk0p3     15333376      15398911         65536        32M    83    Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p5      1687552       1810431        122880        60M     c    W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p6      1818624      15333375      13514752       6.5G    83    Linux

The current /boot of the Raspberry Pi can be found in partition 5. I mounted the partition and took a look at the files:

mount /dev/mmcblk0p5 /mnt

ls -la /mnt
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root    16384 Jan  1   1970 .
drwxr-xr-x 29 root root      200 Dec  1   2015 .
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root       41 Dec  1  09:03 .firmware_revision
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root    18693 Apr 27   2015 COPYING.linux
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     1447 Apr 27   2015 LICENCE.broadcom
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root    18974 Sep 25   2013 LICENCE.oracle
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root    10125 Dec  1  09:02 bcm2708-rpi-b-plus.dtb
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     9846 Dec  1  09:02 bcm2708-rpi-b.dtb
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     9850 Dec  1  09:02 bcm2708-rpi-cm.dtb
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root    11113 Dec  1  09:02 bcm2708-rpi-2-bcm.dtb
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root    17900 Dec  1  09:02 bootcode.bin
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root      120 Jan  1   1980 cmdline.txt
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     1757 Jan  1   1980 config.txt
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     6449 Dec  1  09:02 fixup.dat
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     2473 Dec  1  09:02 fixup_cd.dat
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     9687 Dec  1  09:02 fixup_db.dat
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     9691 Dec  1  09:02 fixup_x.dat
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root      137 May  6   2015 issue.txt
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  4059512 Dec  1  09:02 kernel.img
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  4035396 Dec  1  09:02 kernel7.img
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root      310 Jan  1   1980 os_config.json
drwxr-xr-x  1 root root     6144 Dec  1  09:02 overlays
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  2731192 Dec  1  09:02 start.elf
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root   604792 Dec  1  09:02 start_cd.elf
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  4866440 Dec  1  09:02 start_db.elf
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  3820296 Dec  1  09:02 start_x.elf

And here you can see my screwup: The modified files with the timestamp from Dec 1 09:02.
Luckily there's a boot.bak created by rpi-update in partition 6. The boot.bak folder contains the old boot files.

mkdir /mnt2
mount /dev/mmcblk0p6 /mnt2

ls -la /mnt2/boot.bak/
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root    16384 Jan  1   1970 .
drwxr-xr-x 29 root root      200 Dec  1   2015 .
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root    18693 Apr 27   2015 COPYING.linux
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     1447 Apr 27   2015 LICENCE.broadcom
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root    18974 Sep 25   2013 LICENCE.oracle
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     4702 Apr 27   2015 bcm2708-rpi-b-plus.dtb
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     4423 Apr 27   2015 bcm2708-rpi-b.dtb
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     5690 Apr 27   2015 bcm2708-rpi-2-bcm.dtb
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root    17900 Apr 27   2015 bootcode.bin
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root      120 Jan  1   1980 cmdline.txt
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     1757 Jan  1   1980 config.txt
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     6161 Apr 27   2015 fixup.dat
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     2366 Apr 27   2015 fixup_cd.dat
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     9216 Apr 27   2015 fixup_db.dat
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root     9214 Apr 27   2015 fixup_x.dat
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root      137 May  6   2015 issue.txt
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  3974884 Apr 27   2015 kernel.img
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  3930004 Apr 27   2015 kernel7.img
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root      310 Jan  1   1980 os_config.json
drwxr-xr-x  1 root root     4096 Jan  1   1980 overlays
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 22664088 Apr 27   2015 start.elf
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root   567672 Apr 27   2015 start_cd.elf
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  4644712 Apr 27   2015 start_db.elf
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  3621768 Apr 27   2015 start_x.elf

So the content from boot.bak can be copied to the current /boot partition:

rm -rf /mnt/*
cp -Rp /mnt2/boot.bak/* /mnt/

After that, the Raspberry Pi was able to boot again.

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