BalenaOS first boot: green light blinks 4 times forever

Hey guys.
So, I noticed my balena push weren’t updating the fleet/device anymore, so I thought I was going to try a fresh install/format my sd. I took the SDCard and burned exactly the same image it was before and now my pi won’t boot anymore.

The device keeps blinking the LED 4 times in a row then pause and repeat. I attached HDMI and the screen gets stuck in BalenaOS splash screen written on top “Bridge firewallling registered” and that’s it.

I tried using the latest image “2.83.21” and it happened the same thing. How can I debug this further?

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Hi,

In my experience so far, the 4 blinks usually indicate a networking issue.
This can be caused by changes in the driver.

Can you describe your setup more?
Which device are you using?
How should it connect to internet?

As a sanity check, you can try going back to an older version of Balena that you’re confident in had no connection issues in the past.

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@TJvV So, what happened: I had balena running for 2 months now. I reformatted my sd card with EXACTLY the same image, so in theory it should work just the same, right?

No network config was changed on the wifi, is exactly the same. Is there a way for me to take the SDCard and look at the logs somehow? To know what is happening?

Hi,

If you have persistent logging enabled, you might able to look at the logs.
What works for me, when I plug in my SD card in my Ubuntu machine, is sudo journalctl -D /media/thijs/resin-data/root-overlay/var/log/journal.
Of course you will need to replace the directory I use here with your own mountpoint.

You may want to look at the journalctl documentation for more control over the output.

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How do I enable persistent logging? Remember the device doesn’t even get recognized on the dashboard.

There’s no resin-data/root-overlay/var/log/journal, only resin-data/balena-supervisor and resin-data/docker

I just tried using the production image with ethernet only. Same problem. LED blinks 4 times.

I also tried raspbian, and it worked flawlessly, so I think hardware problems is out of the question.

No idea how to debug this. It sucks that balena splash screen gets in the way, is there a way to see the shell logs and remove this splash screen?

Hey guys, absolutely anything you can say will help, I’m completely clueless, this seems actually like a Balena problem, as evidenced by the fact that updates just stopped working and now I can’t boot my device with exactly same image and hardware.

I tried 5 BalenaOS versions and also tried 32-64 bit variants, no help. They all get stuck into the balena logo splash screen and doesn’t appear on dashboard.

I just purchased a new raspberry pi and I’m waiting for it to arrive, but if every time I have a problem I must purchase new hardware to make it work this makes me dubious if I should have chosen Balena for development.

Hello @lucaswxp apologizes to hear that you have this issues! That’s odd! Thanks @TJvV for your support!

Could you please confirm what device are you using? It’s a Pi, but what version? i missed this information. I would like to try to reproduce your steps.

Hi,

You can change your configuration by editing the file on the SD card.
You can find more information about this here .

If at all possible, it would be useful if you could connect to the devices serial port .
This should allow you to login to the Host OS locally.
From there, you can see the logging real-time (journalctl -fam) and try to make some changes.
Unless I’m mistaking, you will need a “development” image for this to work (so not the “production” version).

It is also possible to muck things up with your application.
What you may also want to try to do, is to preload (and pin) your image with an earlier version of your application.
You can do this using balena-cli.

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Hello lucaswxp ,

For this install raspbery pi os and manual update kernel and firmware via rpi-update. if still problem persistes connect rpi to lan wire and connect ssh to the device and connect to wifi manually.
nmcli d wifi ===> then nmcli d wii connect ssid-name password (password).

It will get connected .

I ran into this today. I discovered a couple things.

First, the 4-blink state isn’t necessarily a failure state. My Rpi3 would get into a 4-blink state and I would just assume it wasn’t working. However, if you give it a few minutes, then it might connect (at which point, the 4-blink will stop.) In my case, while it was blinking, I went over to check ‘balena devices’ and it showed up. When I returned to the device, it was no longer blinking. I don’t think running ‘balena devices’ made a difference, but I’m including it just in case. This happened when wired and on wireless.

The second thing I noticed is that the SSID is case sensitive. When connecting via pre-configured wifi, my device would get stuck in the 4-blink state. On a hunch, I double checked my wifi SSID for capitalization and sure enough, the first letter is capitalized. I never really paid attention because normally it is picked from a list. Configuring the image with an SSID with proper case sensitivity got it working.

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