Recover broken SPI rom (Rpi5)

[nbuchwitz]

Describe the bug

I ran an apt upgrade on a RPi5. After power down the device won't boot and presents an LED error code as soon as I connect the power supply: According to https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/configuration.html#led-warning-flash-codes it is SPI EEPROM error - Pi 4 and Pi 5 (3x long 1x short)

How can I recover the broken device?

Steps to reproduce the behaviour

• sudo apt update
• sudo apt upgrade (devices shuts down, might be unrelated to the actual update)

Device (s)

Raspberry Pi 5

Bootloader configuration.

Cannot provide this, as the device won't boot anymore

System

No response

Bootloader logs

No response

USB boot

No response

NVMe boot

No response

Network (TFTP boot)

No response

[pelwell]

This: https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom#reset-to-factory-defaults ?

[peterharperuk]

RPI imager has a menu "misc utility images" which has bootloader images which you can flash to a blank SD card to recover the bootloader.

[nbuchwitz]

Thanks, already tried that but the device keeps blinking SOS. I will try some other sdcards later. First I will have to deal with the joy of pcie switch erratas ...

[pelwell]

usbboot/rpiboot should also work: rpiboot -d recovery5, I think.

[timg236]

Thanks, already tried that but the device keeps blinking SOS. I will try some other sdcards later. First I will have to deal with the joy of pcie switch erratas ...

Please could you try the SD-card result again and then power up the Pi without an SD-card or other boot-devices? It would be good to confirm whether the SD card update is failing or if it's immediately failing as a result of something on the SD-card.

Also, what size of SDRAM is it?

[timg236]

Boot UART output from the SD card rescue would also be really helpful if you could provide that.

[nbuchwitz]

Unfortunately I already fixed it with another sd card and a durability test case is running. After this is over (probably end of this week), I can test again with the broken SD and provide uart logs.

btw: rpiboot -d recovery5 did not work, nothing was detected. Anything like the nrpiboot pin on cm?

[timg236]

On a Pi5 if you press and hold the power button before connecting the USB-C cable it will go into rpiboot mode.

The recovery.bin does a sha256 check of pieeprom.sig before flashing it, but if something was broken in the low-speed memory setup then that might cause this. However, APT update uses flashrom so I can't see how the initial problem occured.