Whenever I restart my Pioneer FreedomBox, it goes through the initial boot-up process, then stops at a black screen with a tiny cursor blinking in the upper left corner. See pictures.
It can’t be contacted via the network.
I can reset it using a paperclip and the buttons on the back, but it just stops at the blinking cursor again.
The FreedomBox is connected to the Internet via a home router.
I also has it hooked up to my big screen TV via the HDMI port for diagnostics purposes.
The backup battery is connected.
A 1TB harddrive is connected using the bay.
The problem occurred right after I formatted the hard drive with encryption, and installed the first app (SyncThing), if that had anything to do with it.
Even though many of the single board computers have HDMI port the default kernels in Debian many not have support for HDMI output. Looks like u-boot does and you are seeing u-boot output.
If you have encrypted disk unlocking as part of /etc/crypttab then it explains the behavior of the device. It is expecting you to enter the password to unlock the disk before proceeding with booting. Since the device is not fully booted, you can’t access network. You can try to remedy the situation two ways:
Try typing the password for the disk using a physically connected keyboard (even thought you can see the prompt for it on the TV screen.
Plug the SD card into the another computer and comment out the /etc/crypttab entries after mounting the partitions.
After booting, you can unlock the encrypted device each time manually using the command udisksctl unlock --device /dev/??? or the usual cryptsetup command if you installed it.
@joseph , I installed all updates to FreedomBox using the Cockpit, and rebooted.
Then I used the web interface to partition my HDD with GPT, and create one encrypted ext4 partition. I don’t think I checked the button to mount it at boot.
Then I installed SyncThing, but didn’t configure it.
Then I rebooted, and the issue occured.
Thanks @sunil. I had to comment out both the line in /etc/crypttab and the one in /etc/fstab for the HDD. That made the Freedom Box start up again.
Then I messed up and had to reflash the SD card to start over with a fresh installation. I’ll watch closely and screenshot what I do to encrypt the hard drive next time.
Ok, I removed all partitions and made a new partition table on the HDD.
Then I created an encrypted ext4 LUKS2 partition using standard settings (see screenshots).
When I rebooted, the freedombox stopped at an empty screen with a blinking cursor, just like before.
Typing in the password using a USB keyboard doesn’t do anything.
I was able to see the Linux login prompt before I encrypted the HDD, so the kernel must be able to use the HDMI display on the Pioneer FreedomBox.
Should I bug report this? It looks like a reproducible error.
This seems to be a strong clue as to what is happening. From the screenshot, u-boot was able to locate and load the kernel properly.
Please report the bug. However, you are also have the best setup to track down this issue. Please continue to investigate. Since HDMI is working, please use the keyboard to interrupt u-boot’s auto-booting when it says “Hit any key to stop autoboot: …”. Then run the following at the u-boot prompt: setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootwait rw debug
Then resume booting with: boot.
Try to capture the kernel and systemd messages after that.
