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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