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We are putting rpis in one of our products and we have a few dozens of units already in use. We currently observe a very annoying problem - whenever it shuts down or is issued reboot it won't boot back up.

We have examined a few cases, which is not the easiest task in the world because our product needs to be disassembled in order to access the pi, and we found out that it gets stuck on the rainbow screen and nothing happens - no LEDs.

We found out that the cause of this is apparently a corrupted kernel.img file, so I copied both kernel.img and kernel7.img from a working unit and replaced them after which the pi booted.

We are looking for the cause of this problem, because we continue observing it and it is making our product unturnoffable(?), which is unacceptable.

We are running Raspbian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch) on Raspberry Pi Zero W (1 GHz) with Kodak 32GB class 10 SD cards.

php_nub_qq
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    Good luck in your search for the problem. Do you have a question? – joan Dec 28 '21 at 16:21
  • @joan the question is what can be the cause of this and how can we prevent it from happening, I didn't think you could get confused with such an exhaustive description of the problem. – php_nub_qq Dec 28 '21 at 16:24
  • How are you powering the pi? How are you shutting down? Have you considered going to a read-only SD card setup? – Steve Robillard Dec 28 '21 at 16:26
  • @SteveRobillard it is powered with a buck converter and it is being shut down either via the poweroff or reboot commands, power is never cut off while the pi is working. Read-only fs will not work for us because it is used to record things while in use. – php_nub_qq Dec 28 '21 at 16:30
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    Unfortunately, there's no way we can know the cause. The usual cause is that the system is not shut down properly -- but I am sure you are aware of that and you have said that is not happening anyway. There have even been people here report corruption with read-only systems used specifically to avoid the problem, something which has been speculated about without anything decisive being discovered. – goldilocks Dec 28 '21 at 16:33
  • ...Complicating that is the general consensus amongst regulars here is that while SD card corruption can occur occasionally (usually due to power fail, etc), it isn't a problem for us, and that's after years of regular/constant use. Which makes it even more mysterious when people report they are doing everything right. In short, there are already enough Q&As on the general topic here already, I cannot see how there would be anything more to discuss: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&q=%5bsd-card%5d%20corruption%20is%3aquestion – goldilocks Dec 28 '21 at 16:33
  • @goldilocks well thank you for the resources, I guess I'll be deleting this then. – php_nub_qq Dec 28 '21 at 16:37
  • You might as well leave it, since if there does turn out to be some weird new software bug responsible, reports of the specific details are useful to aid in their discovery. – goldilocks Dec 28 '21 at 16:39
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    You can use a read-only SD card and use a flash drive for your data storage. As Goldilocks mentioned power issues are the most common cause, have you tried experimenting with the official power supply? – Steve Robillard Dec 28 '21 at 23:14
  • Have you tried different brand name SD card? – Bravo Dec 29 '21 at 23:17

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