Booting a RPI 1 B+

[Warner Losh]

On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 12:00 PM, Toby <misc.lists at fsck.ch> wrote:

> On 31/12/15 00:36, Tim Kientzle wrote:
>
> > You should consider getting a USB serial adapter cable such as:
> >
> >    http://adafru.it/954
> >
> > This will let you see the earliest boot messages and any errors that may
> be appearing.
> >
> > As others have mentioned, it's worth trying different SDHC cards, since
> the SD drivers do not seem to be compatible with all cards.
>
> I can only second the former. I managed to fill my disk with a typo in a
> dd command on a running pi, after which I never got it to boot again
> with just a blank screen on hdmi. With a USB serial adapter, I could
> have fixed the problem right away.
> Instead, I needed to write the sd card content to a file, copy the file
> to a freebsd vm (my primary machine is a mac and can't mount UFS rw),
> fsck it there, mount it, fix the damage, unmount and write the file back
> to the sd card.
>
> As for the latter, Transcend cards have worked fine for me.
>

If anybody has an SD card that actually doesn't work, I'd be keen to borrow
it
so I can chase down the problem. The SD driver supports all SD cards,
without
qualification. If one doesn't work with the mmc/sd driver, but does with,
say,
a USB adapter, that's a bug. And I'd really like to chase that bug down.

Warner