forum.pistar.uk

2nd Suggestion
Even when wlan is not working the pistar should boot in my opinion.

a friend of mine had rebooting problems. His SD Card was damaged and a new downloaded image on new sd card was the solution.

BR
Kai
dh3ybe

Thanks for the reply's.
Further testing performed.
So the SD card I had used for the pi-star 4.1.5 upgrade, I re-flashed it with the latest Raspberry Raspbian image and put this card into the Pi Zero W. All boots and works fine including the WLAN0. So my Pi Zero W now has a fully functional Raspbian Lite running on it. So this rules out hardware issues on the Pi Zero.

Yes I used the WPA builder. I also created one myself which I used on the 3.4.17 build when I got it the Pi Zero/MMDVM Hat which worked fine with my WiFi access point.

So I took a video as to what was going on as the information was too fast on the screen. It is not the WLAN0 it is complaining about.
It looks like it fails to mount and expand into 2nd partition on the SD card.
EXT4-fs error (device mmcblk0p2): and something about incorrect inodes. This would suggest a faulty SD card.

Although it doesn't explain why the Raspbian image worked fine on the same 16GB SD card. If the card was faulty, then the same error would occur when it unpacked the boot images into the second partition.

I also tried the pi-star V4.1.5 mage on a 8GB card I had lying around. I formatted it in FAT32 using the Raspberry Imager. Burnt the pi-star image to the SD and exactly the same error. OK, it was a card of unknown working condition but the same result occurred.

I will go and buy a brand new 16GB SD card and test again. The cards I use are SanDisk Ultra speed class 10 (UHS class 1). The one that came with the Pi Zero was a BanDisk brand. Hmmm, but it worked on V3.4.17....

Regards
VK3SKL

OK, so I got it working.

It is all dependant on the SD card. I flashed a new 8GB card with V4.1.5_21 using the same steps I did before and it boots into pi-start (No mode defined) which is normal. Great.

So as to why the other SD cards will flash and run a Raspbian image and not a pi-star image is beyond me.

Thanks all for your suggestions.

73
VK3SKL

Thanks for your reply and great feedback, that your equipment is working know.

BR
Kai
dh3ybe

Thanks for all the answers.

But I have still not solve my Upgrade problem.

- I have used 5 different new SD-Cards - no success, no booting.

I have in between successfully upgrated the Firmware of my Jumbohat Kernel 4.9.35+ Pi Zero W Rev 1.1 (512MB) 14.7456 MHz
from V.1.3.3. to 1.5.2. dated 20201108.

Trying to update from 3.4.17 to 4.1.5. via pistar desktop gives following answer:
>>>
Starting upgrade, please wait...
Detected Pi-Star 3.4.17 running on RPi hardware, attached to stm32dvm modem...
You are already running the latest version...
Upgrade process complete, syncing disk cache before making the disk Read-Only
Finished
<<<

So it seems to me that the Version 4.1.5. is not possible for my hardware.

Any hints?

vy 73 Frank DD5MA

PS: my hotspot is working fine with 3.4.17. - so perhaps better not to change any running system

You need to flash the latest version to an sdcard, you cant upgrade inline from 3 to 4....HTH

Hi Frank,

As mentioned before, you can not upgrade directly from 3 to 4.

Here are links, which helped me a lot together with this superb Forum.
https://amateurradionotes.com/
https://amateurradionotes.com/pi-star-updates.htm

Do Not forget to backup your configuration file. After integration of this backup in the new version 4 you may to have to change a few things due to changes in the config structure.

73
Kai
Dh3ybe

Hi ALL,

finally I did it.

I followed patiently all the hints and found after several mistakes a 8-GB-SD-Card that worked.
It was a cheap No-Name card.

vy 73 Frank DD5MA

Hi FRank,

thanks for the update and feedback. I am glad, that it is working now.

73
Kai
dh3ybe

Not getting any success with a new Kingston 32GB card and Raspbery Pi Imager, display is blank