Following an unintended reboot my Pi5 8GB needed several retries
before it booted. It looks like an accumulation of updates piled
up and they all hit at once, with some very odd consequences.

The first is that "high power boot" is no longer enabled, though
hitting the power button a second time bypasses the error and
lets the Pi boot from USB. Config.txt already contains
usb_max_current_enable=1
so the prompt to enable it on-screen seems very odd. The voltage
on the GPIO power pins seems stable at 5.45 volts.

It's much harder to get along without the Raspberry icon and
menu bar, since that makes it hard to start applications in X.
It comes on and flickers, icons and all, a few times before
vanishing for good.

Does anybody have an idea what might be going on? I found https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=345879
but that's three years old.

The machine comes up in command line, so I can log in, but
am otherwise fairly clueless.

Thanks for reading and any ideas!

bob prohaska


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Wed, 28 Oct 2026 21:47:31 -0300, Jim Diamond wrote:

(4) The output of (sudo) journalctl?

journalctl now includes a per-user journal as well, which can be
accessed by an ordinary user without sudo, or explicitly selected with ?--user?.

All the GUI session error messages that used to go into the
~/.xsession-errors file before are now captured here.

(And, boy, are there a lot of them ...)

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-10-26 at 21:51 ADT, bp@www.zefox.net <bp@www.zefox.net> wrote:

Following an unintended reboot my Pi5 8GB needed several retries
before it booted. It looks like an accumulation of updates piled
up and they all hit at once, with some very odd consequences.

The first is that "high power boot" is no longer enabled, though
hitting the power button a second time bypasses the error and
lets the Pi boot from USB. Config.txt already contains usb_max_current_enable=1
so the prompt to enable it on-screen seems very odd. The voltage
on the GPIO power pins seems stable at 5.45 volts.

It's much harder to get along without the Raspberry icon and
menu bar, since that makes it hard to start applications in X.
It comes on and flickers, icons and all, a few times before
vanishing for good.

Does anybody have an idea what might be going on? I found https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=345879
but that's three years old.

The machine comes up in command line, so I can log in, but
am otherwise fairly clueless.

Thanks for reading and any ideas!

Bob,

I haven't seen anything like that, but have you looked at any of the
following to see if there are any messages that might be informative?

(1) The output of (sudo) dmesg ?
(2) /var/log/syslog (assuming it exists on your system)
(3) Any other file in /var/log which has been updated since the last reboot? (4) The output of (sudo) journalctl?

Maybe you will see something by perusing some of the above which might
point you in the right direction.

Jim


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Wed, 28 Oct 2026 21:47:31 -0300, Jim Diamond wrote:

(4) The output of (sudo) journalctl?

journalctl now includes a per-user journal as well, which can be
accessed by an ordinary user without sudo, or explicitly selected with ?--user?.

All the GUI session error messages that used to go into the ~/.xsession-errors file before are now captured here.

(And, boy, are there a lot of them ...)

In the end the problem simply "went away". The trouble seemed to be a mix
of oddities:

A dodgy hdmi cable

A seeming preference by the Pi5 for the newer of two monitors to be primary

A particular monitor layout, with the preferred monitor to the right.

I should add that a series of upgrades were installed and not rebooted until
it happened accidentally, causing a cascade of changes to land at once.

When all the dust settled, everything seems back to normal......

Thanks for writing, apologies for the noise!

bob prohaska


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)