20.04 Random boot failure on RPi 4B

Support & Help Requests Raspberry Pi
#1

Using a Raspberry Pi 4, and for some reason, most of the time the OS will fail to boot. It'll get to the boot splash, and do it's animation, but then it'll go to a black screen, and then cease to function.

My monitor still gets a signal, and sometimes the keyboard will respond to numlock (but not capslock, oddly), but the screen remains black. I have to repeatedly hard-reset my RPi (which can't be too good for the SD...) and hope to random luck that it boots.

Is there any way this can be diagnosed and/or fixed?

#2

I won’t be able to help but answering a few questions might help someone else provide you a solution.

What Raspberry Pi model? (The keyboard model or regular Pi 4?)

Which version of the ARM Ubuntu Mate software are you using?

What kind of SD card?

Have you tried another SD card and/or operating system to rule out the original SD card or OS?

Are you using Ethernet or WiFi? (Unsure this can help for a boot problem.)

Hope you get a good reply to your question. :ok_hand:t2:

#3

Pi 4B, like the title. They keyboard one is the Pi 400.

Ubuntu MATE 20.04... like the title.

SD Card is a 64-bit Samsung Evo Plus card.

Issue happens with both Wifi and Ethernet.

Anyhow, I reduced the likelihood of encountering the issue by adding

hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_drive=2

to usercfg.txt in /boot/firmware

#4

I had a similar issue with the Raspian OS on the SD card but moved the OS to a USB which was much faster and the problem went away. But I did use that same SD card for the desktopify version of Mate last year and it worked fine. So it is still a mystery to me and I don’t have the Pi anymore. There are several versions of Mate for ARM. - just making sure you have the right one. Hope your fix resolved the problem.

#5

Overclocked at all?

My Pi4 runs Raspbian and Manjaro successfully at 1800MHz without needing any other changes, but Ubuntu hardlocks at boot unless it has at least +2 on the voltage.

#6

Nope, standard clock.