Installing Raspbian on PiDrive - Failing

[GORDON_CAMBBELL]

I am having issues with the instructions for running Raspbian on the PiDrive. I have followed the instructions provided on this site exactly, and I have previous experience running Raspbian (same Jessie img source) on a USB flash.

The specific issue happens when Raspbian is booting for the first time after following the instructions; it gets as far as “Starting Remount Root and Kernel File Systems.”

After a while the response is “[FAILED] Failed to start Remount Root and Kernel File Systems.” The process continues until it gets to a series of 6 jobs which seem to loop indefinitely

A reboot results in all manner of “[FAILED]…” messages.

I would appreciate any assistance in figuring out why the PiDrive is not loading the OS.

[majorglory]

Hi Gordon,

We’re looking into this, and I just want to be sure about a few things to help us in debugging:

• One of the errors mentions NOOBS (“apply_noobs_os_config”); was the microSD card flashed with Raspbian Jessie, or NOOBS and then Raspbian?
• Raspbian Jessie by default is now slightly larger than the capacity of most 4GB microSD cards. Is the microSD card large enough? If not, some data might have been truncated.
• There are some ext4 inode errors, as well as an input/output error, which are common when a device is physically disconnected. Double check to make sure the HDD cables and microSD are secure?
• Was the root partition placed somewhere differently or unexpected? For example, the /etc/fstab entry may not correspond to the actual hard drive partition containing the root filesystem, so the partition may not be mounting correctly.

[GORDON_CAMBBELL]

Thanks for getting back to me.
This is the 2015-11-21 Jessie.img.
The DD command resulted in no errors when pointed at the SD card; “3934257152 bytes (3.9 GB) copied”.
On it’s own the SD boots into Raspbian perfectly fine. I had also tried the Jessie-lite img, but exactly the same issue.
I have been checking to make sure the connection was secure, and I ran a scan for bad blocks, no faults found.
Root partition was set to /dev/sda2 in the cmdline.txt (with the addition of the rootdelay=5 cmd).

[GORDON_CAMBBELL]

This is how the SD card looked in GParted when the Jessie img was loaded directly.

[GORDON_CAMBBELL]

Some good news… and information for anyone else experiencing similar issues.

I spent quite a few hours over the weekend to diagnose the issue I had with not being able to boot from the PiDrive. After a lot of dead-end ‘rabbit holes’, these are the observations and how I got things working in the end…

• Check that your SD card is good. Some of my testing involved an SD card that I eventually found was slightly faulty (ie I was having issues even without the PiDrive installed!) - what a waste of a few hours of my life! It wasn’t the one supplied with the PiDrive, I was trying to get full Raspbian Jessie working.
• The latest Raspbian Jessie (Feb 2016) is too large for the PiDrive supplied SD, but the Lite is fine.
• The instructions provided describe cloning the PiDrive image to the SDBoot image, then editing the SDBoot Cmdline.txt to reference /SDA2. I changed the order so that the edit in the reference to /SDA2 was made first, then cloned from PiDrive to SDBoot. This seemed to be the step that got the drive working.

Lesson learnt - if something isn’t working, go back to basics and change one thing at a time. Don’t assume anything and be willing to try something different!