I use a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8gb RAM to run a Plex Media Server and its been running fine for 2 years until today. The Raspberry Pi does not want to boot and run headlessly by ssh.
The red LED is turned on but when connecting power the green LED stays on for a few seconds then very faintly starts flickering which means from what I’ve been told that there is a problem with the SD card.
How can I fix it without formating the SD Card and why has it done this all of a sudden out of the blue?
I run my Raspberry Pi 4 headlessly via Putty so I can’t connect a HDMI cable or anything and when putting the SD Card into my PC via an adpter all the folders appear fine in the boot SD Card so what exactly has gone wrong?
I just plugged in a hdmi cable into the Pi to hook it up to a monitor and when it turned on it showed this message:
You are in emergency mode. After logging in, type “journalctl -xb’ to view system logs, “systemctl reboot” to reboot, “systemctl default” or “exit” to boot into default mode.
Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked.
See sulogin(8) man page for more details.
Press Enter to continue
When pressing enter the screen goes black then takes me back to the same page showing me the message again.
Does this change anything or am I one step closer to fixing it?
I don’t know how/if that error can be recovered from. I have seen it many times in the past (a years or so ago) and at the time my search for the answer turned up little info on how to fix this (at least simple) so I gave up and reimaged the SD card. As time went on it was happening much more frequently (a week or maybe a month). Eventually I noticed errors on the console (I too run mine headless so I don’t normally go there), something like ‘undervoltage detected’ . I replaced the power supply (with the official pi 4 one, as recommend buy most searches) and haven’t had a problem since. I don’t know if that’s your problem but somehow your SD card has gotten corrupted.
{EDIT: Your SD card may have just warn-out]
If you have to rebuild the SD (or not) make sure you back it up (to your PC) occasionally so you don’t have to start have to start from scratch if/when it happens again.
Now I’ve salvaged as 250Gb SSD from a friend’s dead laptop I use it (via USB to SATA adapter) to boot from instead of a SD card (faster better). I also switched to Raspberry Pi OS 64. Yes it’s still beta but I’ve had no problems running it (PMS included) for ~4 months.
As this is really a Pi OS(/hardware?) problem rather than Plex, you will likely find better and faster responses else-ware: say Raspberry Pi Forums - Index page , google searches etc.
I think this may be a problem with the power supply as I use a dual USB plug which according to one of my mates isn’t powerful enough to power my Raspberry Pi and the 2tb external hard drive that I have too. I am going to buy the official Raspberry Pi plug to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Do you know if there is a way to still format the SD card but not lose the progress I have made on it such as my Plex server and Samba Share that I use to transfer files over from my PC? It would be a bit of a bummer if I have to start from scratch and rebuild it from the beginning.
I have just put a fresh new SD Card loaded with the Raspberry Pi OS in it and it’s working fine so it isn’t a hardware issue.
However when putting the SD card that won’t boot into the Raspberry Pi via a SD Card USB adapter all my files and everything show up suggesting I can recover it and not lose everything on it.
How can I fix my original SD card that I use for my Plex Server so that I don’t lose everything on it now that I’ve found the files on it are still there and available?
First thing I don’t recommend attempting to repair the old SD card but you may be able to salvage most of your progress you’ve made, provided that it is not corrupted.
Also don’t be so quick to dismiss the possibility that this was caused by a hardware problem (kind of like when your car acts up but works fine when you take it to a mechanic).
So here is what I would do:
Install PMS and make sure it is accessible via 192.168.xxx.xxx:32400/web/ , you don’t need to add any libraries.
install any other software needed samba, ntfs… … as/if required
Plugin the card reader with the old SD card in it to the pi.
The next steps need to be done with sudo, so add sudo to each command or enter a root session with sudo bash
Type fdisk -l
Look through the list for your old SD card, it should look somthing like this:
Disk /dev/sde: 29.7 GiB, 31914983424 bytes, 62333952 sectors
Disk model: MassStorageClass
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xae439061
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sde1 8192 532479 524288 256M c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sde2 532480 62333951 61801472 29.5G 83 Linux
Next mount the “Linux” partition NOT the “FAT32” one mount /dev/sde2 /mnt
to get back your shares you should cut and past your additions from /mnt/etc/exports and /mnt/etc/fstab to /etc/exports and /etc/fstab
You can also copy over any changes you have in your /home/user
At this point it’s best to reboot and verify your mounts and shares are good.
The next step to restore your PMS stuff is probably best described in this post (adjust it for the mount /mnt…)
I have a similar problem with my pi4.
Plexmediaserver is running perfectly, I also added my libraries are working and I casn even watch movies. but sometimes (what seams random to me) the “connection” gets lost from the server.
I Work with SSH.
When I try a command on the Pi over SSH: “”-bash: cd: /home/ubuntu: Input/output error""
When I exit and then want to rebuild the SSH Connection i get the following error:
““kex_exchange_identification: read: Connection reset””
When I ping the Pi I get 0 losts and my router sees the connection over Eth0…
Only way to connect to the Pi is to restart the machine and mount the External mediadrive again
-_-
Does someone have an idea where the problem is?
Thank you!!
