Raspberry Pi B+ - Software Upgrade Problems

[seancsnm]

I'm not sure if very many people are knowledgable about the Raspberry Pi, but I thought I'd ask.

I purchased one about 2 years ago and finally just yesterday started to get it up and running. Here's a summary of what I did and the result:

1) Download 2015-11-21 Raspbian-Jessie (not the lite version) image.
2) Download and install Win32DiskImager 0.9.5.
3) Burned image onto 16 GB microSD card (Kingston SDC4/16GB 089).
4) Installed SD card in Raspberry Pi. Added power. It seemed to work flawlessly. I connected to Internet via ethernet.
5) After playing around a bit and cycling the power a few times, I decided to get bluetooth up and running. Several sites recommended installing updates and upgrades using the following commands as a first step:

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sudo apt-get update (takes about 5-10 minutes)
sudo apt-get upgrade (takes 2-3 hours)

After I completed these commands (the latter does a LOT of stuff), the terminal returned with nothing that alarmed me - it looked like it had just finished installing the last package.
6) Restarted Raspberry Pi via the OS. When it booted up again, it ran a bunch of lines across the terminal, as it normally would, but when it was done, instead of displaying the GUI, it displayed a black screen with a blinking cursor at the top left of the screen. It looked like it was waiting on something, so I let it sit 30 minutes or more, but nothing. I restarted with the same result. I thought maybe something went wrong with the upgrade process so I completely repeated steps 1-5. Same issue.

I'm a bit stumped. At the beginning of the upgrade process I was warned that an additional 100 MB would be installed. I didn't check how much space I had left, but I can't imagine having filled up the SD card completely. Any ideas as to what the issue might be and/or how to fix it?

[richmazz]

3) Burned image onto 16 GB microSD card (Kingston SDC4/16GB 089).

Have you checked that this SD card is good? It doesn't sound like this is the case but it is worth checking. If you were able to wipe it and rewrite the image, it should be. And, typically if the SD card is not read by the Pi, nothing will display on the screen.

4) Installed SD card in Raspberry Pi. Added power. It seemed to work flawlessly. I connected to Internet via ethernet.
5) After playing around a bit and cycling the power a few times, I decided to get bluetooth up and running. Several sites recommended installing updates and upgrades using the following commands as a first step:

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sudo apt-get update (takes about 5-10 minutes)
sudo apt-get upgrade (takes 2-3 hours)


This was done through GUI so you were able to access GUI at one point?

I'm a bit stumped. At the beginning of the upgrade process I was warned that an additional 100 MB would be installed. I didn't check how much space I had left, but I can't imagine having filled up the SD card completely. Any ideas as to what the issue might be and/or how to fix it?

Yeah, as long as the card is good, you are right in assuming that it should not be anywhere near full.

Ok, so the screen you are seeing is just pure black with a blinking cursor? No other characters at all?

Is the Pi hardwired to a network? Can you see the device listed if you look at the connected device list on your router?

[wraper]

If this memory card was ordered from China, most likely it is a counterfeit. Raspberry pi SD card incompatibility is not rare, even if it boots normally, file system corruption may occur.
http://elinux.org/RPi_SD_cards

[seancsnm]

To answer your questions:

1) The system did display the GUI when ever it booted up all the way up until I restarted the system AFTER the upgrade was complete.

2) The microSD card has not been used all that heavily, but over its lifetime it's been used as a bootloader for a Beaglebone Black, as a FAT-formatted storage medium for music and other files on a portable device, and for the Pi in the application described in my OP. After I crashed the system the first time, I rewrote the original image to it and the system boot up just fine. It wasn't until after I did the upgrade that I had problems.

3) To clarify on exactly what it looked like when I restarted/powered the Pi on for the first time after doing the upgrade: First, a sequence of console-style commands/progress indicators streamed across the screen. This occurred before I did the upgrade and although I don't think I'm explaining it very well, I'm pretty certain this is normal for the Raspbian version of Linux. Then, after the last command finishes, the screen paused for a second, went black for about 5 seconds, and turned back on, with a cursor at the top of the screen blinking at non-regular intervals.

4) The memory card was, I believe, ordered from Newegg.com (not through another reseller listed by Newegg).

5) I haven't checked to see if the device can be seen on the network, but it is wired through an ethernet cable. I will do that next.

[BloodyCactus]

can you ssh in from another computer? the video driver might have changed, it might need to be explicitly told to use a certain monitor resolution.

[richmazz]

5) I haven't checked to see if the device can be seen on the network, but it is wired through an ethernet cable. I will do that next.

If the device is listed, we will try to ssh in to the device and check some system logs to try and give us a better idea of what is going on.

[seancsnm]

I've done another fresh install. This time before attempting to run an upgrade I got the network settings setup to a static IP address so I can reliably SSH in. Unfortunately, it seems that I need to actually use the network controller on the pi before it will let me ssh in - it responds to a ping but gives me the following message if I try to ssh right after boot-up:

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ssh: connect to host 192.168.0.31 port 22: Connection refused
When I ping say, the router, from the pi just before trying to ssh in things are successful. I did an update, then I restarted, then tried to do an upgrade, with this result:

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pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  libdrm-freedreno1 libdrm-nouveau2 libdrm-radeon1 libelf1 libllvm3.5
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
  alacarte apt apt-utils bind9-host ca-certificates claws-mail claws-mail-i18n
  curl dpkg dpkg-dev file fuse gir1.2-gdkpixbuf-2.0 git git-core git-man
  isc-dhcp-client isc-dhcp-common krb5-locales libapt-inst1.5 libapt-pkg4.12
  libbind9-90 libc-bin libc-dev-bin libc6 libc6-dbg libc6-dev libcupsfilters1
  libcurl3 libcurl3-gnutls libdns-export100 libdns100 libdpkg-perl
  libdrm-freedreno1 libdrm-nouveau2 libdrm-radeon1 libdrm2 libegl1-mesa
  libfm-data libfm-extra4 libfm-gtk-data libfm-gtk4 libfm-modules libfm4
  libfuse2 libgbm1 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-common libgl1-mesa-glx
  libglapi-mesa libgssapi-krb5-2 libgudev-1.0-0 libirs-export91
  libisc-export95 libisc95 libisccc90 libisccfg-export90 libisccfg90
  libjavascriptcoregtk-3.0-0 libk5crypto3 libkrb5-3 libkrb5support0 libldb1
  liblwres90 libmagic1 libnspr4 libpam-modules libpam-modules-bin
  libpam-runtime libpam-systemd libpam0g libpcre3 libpng12-0 libpng12-dev
  libraspberrypi-bin libraspberrypi-dev libraspberrypi-doc libraspberrypi0
  libsmbclient libssh-4 libssl1.0.0 libsystemd0 libtiff5 libudev1 libvdpau1
  libwbclient0 libwebkitgtk-3.0-0 libwebkitgtk-3.0-common libxml2 locales
  login lxpanel lxpanel-data multiarch-support nodered nuscratch omxplayer
  openssh-client openssh-server openssh-sftp-server openssl oracle-java8-jdk
  passwd pcmanfm perl perl-base perl-modules python-rpi.gpio python3-rpi.gpio
  raspberrypi-bootloader raspberrypi-sys-mods raspberrypi-ui-mods raspi-config
  rc-gui rsyslog samba-common samba-libs sonic-pi ssh sudo systemd
  systemd-sysv tzdata udev wiringpi wolfram-engine xserver-common
  xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
  xserver-xorg-video-fbdev xserver-xorg-video-fbturbo
132 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 503 MB of archives.
After this operation, 173 MB of additional disk space will be used.
E: You don't have enough free space in /var/cache/apt/archives/.

Interesting... This is what I get back when trying to check my available disk space. Any ideas as to why the space allocation falls so short of 16 GB?

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pi@raspberrypi:~ $ df -Bm
Filesystem     1M-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root          3567M 3274M       93M  98% /
devtmpfs            214M    0M      214M   0% /dev
tmpfs               218M    0M      218M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs               218M    5M      213M   3% /run
tmpfs                 5M    1M        5M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs               218M    0M      218M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1       60M   20M       41M  34% /boot
tmpfs                44M    0M       44M   0% /run/user/1000

Update: I followed this guide to expand the OS's utilization of the SD card and the result was:

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df -Bm
Filesystem     1M-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root         14469M 3276M    10551M  24% /
devtmpfs            214M    0M      214M   0% /dev
tmpfs               218M    0M      218M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs               218M    5M      213M   3% /run
tmpfs                 5M    1M        5M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs               218M    0M      218M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1       60M   20M       41M  34% /boot
tmpfs                44M    0M       44M   0% /run/user/1000

I'm gonna wait the 2 hours or however long it takes for the upgrade to occur and see if results are more favorable...

Update: The memory utilization does in fact seem to have been the problem. I've so far successfully done an upgrade and restarted the system, and everything seems to be as it should. Maybe this thread will come in handy for someone else...

[3db]

Looks like you hadn't expanded the file system to use all the space on the card.

[seancsnm]

Looks like you hadn't expanded the file system to use all the space on the card.

Yup.