Got a couple rpi 3Bs I’d like to use headless.
Downloaded 32bit pi os lite, flashed it to an sd card, powered on and did the initial setup (select keyboard layout, set first user+pass).
As soon as I’m dropped into a shell, I run ‘sudo apt update’ then ‘sudo apt upgrade -y’.
Once these finish, I type ‘sudo reboot’; the pi reboots, shows the rainbow splash, about a dozen lines of kernal boot messages then the video output dies and after a couple seconds the act light stops flashing too. Disconnecting power and powering it again does the same thing.
I don’t think it’s hardware failure as I get the same results with both 3Bs and with a 4B.
I don’t know what to do from here.
I’ve spent the last 6 hours retrying this with both the 32 and 64 bit versions of pi os light. I can’t get past the initial update/upgrade.
Anyone got any ideas? Anyone got a spare sd card, a pi 3B, and some free time to see if I’m just stupid somehow? I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong.
/edit: RESULTS!
I can only assume this was a bad sd card. Tried a different card, with the exact same procedure: it finally booted after an upgrade.
Ran the update/upgrade again + a dist-upgrade and a couple more reboots. Up and running.
Excuse me while I go grab an image of that working card to file away.
No, just an hdmi cable directly between the pi+monitor.
Just downloaded the .img.xz, extracted the .img with 7zip, flashed to a card with win32diskimager.
Any reason you avoided the official Raspberry Pi Imager software? You really can just configure a headless OS all before flashing the SD card. Choose RPi OS lite from the list, then set up your hostname, username, password, wireless and turn on SSH service. Then all you have to do after flashing is plug in power and SSH in. None of this display troubleshooting would be needed.
Because this method has worked just fine for years. It’s also how I restore my backups so it’s a familiar process.
Configuration was never the issue; I have no problem setting it up manually and switching it to being headless when I’m ready for that.
The display not working is a symptom; the entire device was shutting down, not just refusing to output video unfortunately.
Turned out to be a faulty sd card. New one is now working just fine.