# Raspberry Pi boot woes



## blah44 (Dec 2, 2013)

I pulled down the two most recent images, bsd-pi-250580M.img.xz and bsd-pi-252209M.img.xz NO INVARIANTS, to a different Pi running Debian. I uncompressed them with `xzcat IN > OUT`, wrote it to the SD card with `dd if=img of=/dev/sda bs=2048k` (and again with bs=4096k), and moved the card to the slot of the intended host.

I apply power and nothing! No text or anything. This happened with the Debian image when I mistakenly wrote it to a sub partition of the card, but I am fairly sure that is not the problem this time around.

Any ideas?


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## juedan (Dec 15, 2013)

Hello @blah44,

Hm, I used other dd options: `dd if=img of=/dev/sda bs=1M` and after this I copied the newest BOOTCODE.BIN and START.ELF to the boot partition of the card. Then I waited about two minutes until the buffer was completely written to the card. Then FreeBSD boots nearly perfect.

Best regards

JueDan

Link to the bootcode: https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware ... aster/boot


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## neel (Dec 16, 2013)

Instead of doing `xzcat IN > OUT`, try doing `xz -d bsd-pi-[REVISION]M.img.xz` and then doing `dd if=bsd-pi-[REVISION]M.img of=/dev/[DRIVENAME] bs=4M conv=sync`


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## blah44 (Dec 26, 2013)

Awesome; thanks guys! I will try both once I get home from this winter trip.


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## blah44 (Jan 15, 2014)

Success! The key was to drag in the latest start.elf and bootcode.bin files. I think the dd(1) and xz(1) commands were fine, although I matched you guys anyway to eliminate differences.

Sadly I have the infamous SD card timeout too large message, which I am guessing means my card type is not in some database or list. Here it is from dmesg:

```
8GB <SDHC SD08GB 8.0 SN 1889075895 MFG 06/2009 by 3SD> at mmc0 25.0MHz/4bit/65535-block
```


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## juedan (Jan 15, 2014)

Hello,

The "timeout message" is a problem of the *R*aspberry SD card controller (SDHCI controller) with many SD cards.

JueDan


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## blah44 (Jan 15, 2014)

Right, I think I found your other messages online when I web searched for this message. Did you get it fixed, and how?


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## juedan (Jan 15, 2014)

I fixed the problem by using another SD card  :e  Now I'm using a Kingston SDHC 4GB Class 4 which works well but slow. I made the experience that when the SDHCI controller on the Raspberry is cold there are no problems accessing the cards. But if the thing gets warmer booting becomes a problem and it takes sometimes three restarts until a login is possible.

Best regards

JueDan


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