Raspberry Pi 3B+ - Windows 10 IOT - Led Flashes 7 Times

Question

I have a problem with my 3b+ that I am using as an aquarium controller.

This controller seems to work fine for multiple days and then it stops updating my web server. Which it is supposed to do via WIFI every minute 24x7.

This is running in a headless mode.

I often find if I then turn the device off, wait for a period of time (10-30 seconds) and turn it back on nothing happens.

I then plug an HDMI cable in and find nothing on the screen. I open the box it is housed in and I find that the pi is on (red led) and the green led flashes 7 times and repeats.

This means that it cant load a boot file.

If I remove or just move the SD card and power off and on it works again but it is a pain in the butt to do this all the time.

Is this a problem with the PI, or with the SD card?

Sometimes I have to reflash the card to get it to work properly again.

Can a Windows 10 IOT boot from another method? like a USB Stick or is that Linux only?

Chris

Answer 1

As I understand your question, you are running Windows IoT on your RPi instead of RPi OS (or another Linux variant) - is that true? If so, I don't understand why you would ask this question here... does Microsoft - or your vendor - not provide support?

But - in any case, here are my thoughts:

1. μSD cards (hereinafter SD cards) are not the sturdiest things - it's always a possibility that yours has simply failed - or is near failure. The symptoms sound familiar. SD cards have a wearout mechanism, and may behave strangely as they approach end-of-life.

2. You should confirm that the SD card is being mounted with the Windows equivalent of the noatime option for mount. Otherwise, Windows may be wearing out your SD card prematurely with unnecessary writes (file access times) to the file system.

3. If you have a spare SD card, and if you have tools to copy an image from one SD card to another (rufus may be able to do this), copy your existing SD card to the spare SD card, and try again. If this cures your problem, you at least know where the problem lies.

   Devices such as this may come in handy:

4. If you were running RPi OS or had a Linux system at your disposal, I would advise checking your SD card with fsck. But as it appears you're not, perhaps you can find something similar in Windows - chkdsk perhaps? I know nothing about chkdsk - you'll need to do that research, or ask about its efficacy somewhere else.

   If you do have a Linux machine, using fsck isn't difficult. A recent answer here contained a fairly detailed procedure for using fsck. Refer to man fsck if you need help with fsck options.