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I flashed a clean 4GB SD card with raspbmc, and ran it on my Pi. It progresses through the installer but gets stuck in a reboot loop:

'R' screen -> "Relax, XBMC will resume shortly..." -> Blue "Updating XBMC" -> 'R' screen -> etc...

Pulling the power doesn't help, it reverts back to this cycle, except instead of the blue "Updating XBMC" screen there's a few lines of text, ending with "Mounting local filesystems: failed". Pressing esc to get to the terminal gets me to a black screen, I can't type at all. Nothing is connected to the Pi apart from a USB keyboard. I've reflashed the card twice, and the same thing happens. What's going on?

Tom Medley
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    Have you tried another card? – Steve Robillard Aug 06 '12 at 19:02
  • @SteveRobillard No other cards on hand at the moment, but up until recently I was running raspbian off this card fine (and I did a total erase of the card before installing RaspBMC) – Tom Medley Aug 06 '12 at 19:03
  • Seeing as 3 people on this site have reported issues with Raspbmc I was going to recommend trying the older (possibly more stable) RC3 rather than RC4, but when I went to find a link the Raspbmc site was down. – Dan B Aug 06 '12 at 20:09
  • Unplug the keyboard (they cause issues sometimes) unplug it all and try again. If it carries on it is most likely the SD card. I had this similar issues first time with Raspbian- Iffy SD card.. – Piotr Kula Aug 06 '12 at 20:24
  • I am having the exact same problem. I am using a Patriot LX 8gb series 10 card and have used it to run Raspbian and OpenElec with no problems. I am currently loading the prebuilt image from here: http://www.juicypi.com/downloads/RC4+Addons.rar Hopefully I'll have more luck with that. –  Aug 06 '12 at 19:37
  • Let me know how you get on! I'm frustrated by how impenetrable this problem seems to be! – Tom Medley Aug 06 '12 at 19:39
  • what about the power supply? Is it strong enough? – rdmueller Aug 10 '12 at 10:37
  • @Ralf It's connected to the mains, so I would assume so. – Tom Medley Aug 10 '12 at 10:38
  • What power supply are you using? – Alex Chamberlain Aug 13 '12 at 09:11
  • @AlexChamberlain Whichever one RS Components recommended I buy with the Pi. – Tom Medley Aug 13 '12 at 09:13
  • Have you got a multi-meter? – Alex Chamberlain Aug 13 '12 at 09:15
  • @AlexChamberlain No, but I do have other power supplies I can try. I'll give it a go when I get the chance. – Tom Medley Aug 13 '12 at 09:17
  • Yeah, do. That looks like a ye-olde transformer supply, so could drop voltage at high currents. – Alex Chamberlain Aug 13 '12 at 09:18
  • I've got the same issue now. The boot loop as described with raspbmc RC4 Anyone figure it out? – gurrier Aug 13 '12 at 09:07
  • I had the exact same experience after I did apt-get upgrade. It may have something to do with different kernel versions. I'm a Linux Noob, but I'm learning! –  Sep 01 '12 at 09:36

4 Answers4

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I experienced the same problem. I think the trigger of the reboot chain was an apt-get upgrade, though I'm not 100% sure. The only thing I tried was re flashing the SD, which helped till I finished to configure the system (installed samba, auto mounting devices etc). In my current image I avoided the upgrade and it runs fine up to now.

Luc
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  • Just did the same. XBMC was running fine (except my Airplay wasn't working) then I decided to sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade and BOOM reboot loop! – Joe Sep 30 '12 at 16:53
  • my SSH stoped working as well. is there anyway to abort XBMC from boot? – Hadi Farnoud Oct 13 '12 at 08:37
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Finally got to the bottom of this: it was a dodgy power adapter. Replacing the power adapter seems to have fixed the problem!

Tom Medley
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  • This was my problem as well. My RPi B+ had worked just fine for weeks but suddenly got stuck in a boot loop (the raspberry logo showed up for a second, reboot, repeat) when I tried to power it via a USB extension cable. – Emil Lundberg Sep 15 '14 at 10:33
  • My problem was close: a dodgy USB cable... – Guy Moreillon Oct 01 '15 at 14:46
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Not a great solution, but you can get the RPi to boot by disconnecting the ethernet cable while booting (preventing it from trying to update) and plugging it back in when it's up and running.

Tom Medley
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0

I had a similar reboot loop issue with a 4Gb sdcard and have now got it working after a reflash. The only things I changed were that I wiped and reformatted the card with an NTFS format instead of FAT before running install.py (I wondered if 4Gb was the issue) and then I also had direct ethernet cable plugged in before booting up the first time (I had no screen so am not sure whether it installed correctly).

It may have run without an internet connection the first time I tried.

gurrier
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