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I have (had) a Discord bot living on my Raspbery Pi 3 B+, and all was well for about a week. Then the bot crashed mysteriously (and the Pi stopped responding to SSH). I plugged the Pi into a monitor and poked around the filesystem a bit and everything seemed normal, but when I went to dig into raspi-config to see if anything looked funny it showed an empty blue screen instead of the settings dialog and stopped responding to input altogether. No command line, no "quit" command, no nothing.

I've seen a few fixes on the Internet for ssh/WiFi not working, but testing them sort of relies on the Pi being functional so my main concern is the blank screen and apparent crash. I'm reluctant to pull the plug and start it up again because I know that can brick the OS but I'm suspecting the damage might already be done.

(Googling around suggested the Pi might not be getting enough power, but I'm using the power supply from the official web site so I'm doubtful that that's the issue.)

edit: turned if off and turned it on again to see what's probably some SD card corruption (see comment thread) so this likely can't be fixed in this go-round, but if/when it happens again I'd like to know what I can do about it . . .

Dragonite
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  • can it boot at all now? If so, what is the output of sudo systemctl status ssh - that'll tell you if ssh is running (or why it failed) ... other things to look at are various log files in /var/log to see if there's any errors, the output of sudo dmesg to see if anything fails during boot etc - to get raspi-config working, you could also try sudo apt-get install raspi-config --reinstall - as long as you have a network connection of course – Jaromanda X Jul 30 '18 at 01:02
  • The command line is completely inaccessible so I unplugged it and plugged it back in, if that's what you mean. Nothing revealing now, just a nice not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown- block(179,2) kernel panic. (Also, this trick didn't seem to do anything.)

    At this point I may as well just reinstall the whole thing and hope it doesn't happen again, though it'd be cool if I could figure out what happened so if/when it does I know what to do.

     – Dragonite Jul 30 '18 at 03:43
  • I'd say the SD card was trashed - not irreversibly, but enough of the important "boot" files trashed to make the system unbootable – Jaromanda X Jul 30 '18 at 03:45
  • Is it possible that's what caused the weird behavior in the first place? – Dragonite Jul 30 '18 at 03:47
  • I had a pi running continuously for a few years - eventually SD cards die - now, since you have a PI3B+, you can't have been running for more than about 5 months, so, it's not likely "normal" SD card deterioration at fault - perhaps a junk SD card - or something you were doing was really hitting the SD card hard, like constant writing 24/7 - or just an unfortunate failure due to "some other reason™" - hard to tell - you have SD card, only you can throw it in another computer and check it out – Jaromanda X Jul 30 '18 at 03:54
  • The card itself isn't new (I'm not actually certain how old it is) but when I stick it in a Windows computer and chkdsk nothing stands out as suspicious. I haven't written any code to excessively read/write from the card and the card activity light hasn't been flashing like mad, but I'll keep that in mind for the future. Earlier problems I had with the (179, 2) error seemed to be caused by the image not being written to the card properly, but it was running without any issue for five days so that's also probably not it this time. – Dragonite Jul 30 '18 at 04:04
  • Windows only checks the boot partition – Jaromanda X Jul 30 '18 at 04:06
  • Even after formatting it but before installing the image? Hmm, that could be a problem. Is there another solution? – Dragonite Jul 30 '18 at 04:19

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