Rpi4 wont boot after latest firmware update

[Tortoiseman1958]

Hi. My original post has disappeared so am reposting.
Been running TA for several years on an Rpi 4b. Last week bought a new Xtra high speed micro SD card to hopefully speed thing up a bit. I also took the opportunity to give my Rpi4 a little love and tlc and treat it to an update to the latest firmware V12 bookworm.
Following the update the Rpi boots fine on bookworm but wont boot either with the new SD card or the original one that has worked for years. I just see the green led flashing 7 times which i understand to mean that it cant boot/the kernel.img can't be found. Tried reflashing the image on the new card but same problem.
Has anything changed in the lasted Rpi update?
Any suggestions welcomed because i really miss Waze since i do a lot of commercial driving
K

[focher]

I am having the exact same issue. I see the Pi come on with the Raspberry boot page, then it goes to the rainbow screen and never continues. I also tested with Bookworm on the same device and it boots fine.

I think this is a dupe of #41

[kan3nas]

I did some testing with my rpi4 and it works fine, so I said lets update firmware and install the nice case heatsink and now i am stack at the rainbow boot screen.

Doing the same procedure with rpi imager no longer works, I even tried older version 2025.1.1 and even 2024.26.1 still the same for more than 30 minutes the rpi4 is stack on the rainbow screen.

I tried also with and without ethernet cable just in case it needs some stuff from net,
and with and without hdmi cable still the same issue

rpi-epprom-update seems to have issues

[mikegapinski]

I'll check that before I push the next release, it seems like newer epprom/firmware (not sure what version) needs the updated kernel / bootfiles on the OS side.

I'd suggest rolling back for now, you can do it with their CLI on raspbian

[Tortoiseman1958]

I'll check that before I push the next release, it seems like newer epprom/firmware (not sure what version) needs the updated kernel / bootfiles on the OS side.

I'd suggest rolling back for now, you can do it with their CLI on raspbian

Hi Mike. Thanks for feedback comments. Just had a quick look but i'm not a super tekky you see and have no idea how to 'roll back with CLI on raspbian' unfortunately. I'm your basic copy and paste merchant! is there a simple script i can use?

BTW I really appreciate your help and all the work you've put into this project. I totally love Tesla Android!!!
K

[Tortoiseman1958]

I'll check that before I push the next release, it seems like newer epprom/firmware (not sure what version) needs the updated kernel / bootfiles on the OS side.
I'd suggest rolling back for now, you can do it with their CLI on raspbian

Hi Mike. Thanks for feedback comments. Just had a quick look but i'm not a super tekky you see and have no idea how to 'roll back with CLI on raspbian' unfortunately. I'm your basic copy and paste merchant! is there a simple script i can use?

BTW I really appreciate your help and all the work you've put into this project. I totally love Tesla Android!!! K

Actually i think i've already tried this option with no success. It just inserts the latest stable version which is were the problem seems to lie.
K

[kan3nas]

Using this eeprom manager from
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=283347
I moved from critical to stable and then beta but all the times still the same issue.
I choose the respective version then reboot to get it installed
and then shutdown, switch the microsd card and boot again

rainbow screen is stack there and the green light flashes for 7 times and then a longer pause, then again 7 times then pause

maybe there should be a beta/alpha channel with the new version before the stable release if it fixes this issue
Using the switch branch release there seems to be an android 15 release but it does not have any img files pre-compiled
and using the manual compile from source is not very clear at least for my experience

Please @mikegapinski add the pre-release version you told us or the beta/alpha android 15 and I could test them for you
Thank you in advance

[mikegapinski]

@kan3nas if you are on the TA slack I can add you to the beta channel, but there is no build available there yet.

With the eeprom manager you are only switching channels, not rolling back to the old "working" version of the firmware, so it's clear that it won't work.

One thing to note, it is not as simple as bumping the boot firmware on my end sadly, since TA doesn't update the eeprom on its own I need to make sure I push out something that works on both the older a newer firmware. All the devices I ship to customers have a known working firmware so I can't break them.

I have a lot of pi4s, I'll just update the firmware on it, attach a debug probe, fix it and test all the hardware configurations. If it's a quick and easy fix I'll push a stable TA build with this very quickly :)

[kan3nas]

@mikegapinski thank you for the feedback

I managed to make it boot again!
What I did was to download the whole repository in a zip file and expand it from
https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/tree/master

then mount the microsd card prepared from raspberry imager and copy over the common files from "/boot" zip dir to micro sd

I did this once and then I saw the android screen!!!
but then rpi4 rebooted and in a minute I am again on the rainbow image forever.

I mount again the microsd in windows and now it seems that many partitions are there so something really worked from the previous step.

What the heck I thought lets do the boot trick again on the above microsd
so I repeated again the copy of the common files from /boot to the microsd and it booted!!!

[mikegapinski]

That's great! So this was the case of needing a fresh set of bootfiles like I expected, now I'll just test it on a 2nd pi/cm4 with the older eeprom to make sure those work all other boards.

[mikegapinski]

*** UPDATE AVAILABLE ***

BOOTLOADER: update available
   CURRENT: Wed Jan 11 17:40:52 UTC 2023 (1673458852)
    LATEST: Thu May  8 15:21:35 UTC 2025 (1746717695)
   RELEASE: default (/usr/lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader-2711/default)
            Use raspi-config to change the release.

  VL805_FW: Using bootloader EEPROM
     VL805: up to date
   CURRENT: 000138c0
    LATEST: 000138c0

Grabbed a brand new pi4 from the box, damn those things were sitting on a shelf for a long time :)

[Tortoiseman1958]

Hi @mikegapinski. Any progress on the update?
Could you release a Beta version just for those affected by this update? We will have to do a reinstall anyway.
K