Raspberry Pi 4 Model B - SPI EEPROM Corruption/Recovery

[B.Goode]

A heads-up for regular volunteer helpers in these forums -

This new (as of June 2019) text has just appeared on the Raspberry Pi official Downloads Page:

Recovery

If your Raspberry Pi 4 will not boot, it is possible that the SPI EEPROM has become corrupted.

To check, remove the SD card, disconnect the device from power, then reconnect it. If the green LED does not flash, you will need to reprogram the EEPROM:

Download the bootloader
Extract it to an empty FAT-formatted SD card and insert it into your Raspberry Pi 4
Connect the power and wait for the green LED to flash quickly

Ref: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/


One important consequence of this is that my oft-given assurance that an RPi board has no user-modifiable persistent memory and is thus always 'factory fresh' at every Power On is henceforth not accurate.

[jamesh]

Indeed. The Pi4 has 512Kb of EEPROM which hold the bootloader.

However, corrupting this is VERY difficult, so nothing to really worry about, and easily recovered using the instructions given.

The benefits are that we can upgrade the bootloader (previously hardwired in to the SoC) in the field, so we can add things like USB and PXE boot at a later stage.

[timg236]

One important consequence of this is that my oft-given assurance that an RPi board has no user-modifiable persistent memory and is thus always 'factory fresh' at every Power On is henceforth not accurate.

On Pi3 it is possible to change the boot behaviour via OTP settings and this is required for PXE/USBBOOT so if these bits are set it's actually impossible to restore to a "factory fresh" configuration.

On Pi4 PXE/USB boot will be an EEPROM setting so it will always be possible to restore the boot behaviour to a factory fresh state.

As JamesH says nothing in Rasbian writes (or reads!) from the boot EEPROM so it's not going to get corrupted by accident.

[recklessop]

Indeed. The Pi4 has 512Kb of EEPROM which hold the bootloader.

However, corrupting this is VERY difficult, so nothing to really worry about, and easily recovered using the instructions given.

The benefits are that we can upgrade the bootloader (previously hardwired in to the SoC) in the field, so we can add things like USB and PXE boot at a later stage.

I have a board that I have tried the proceedure on and it doesnt appear to work.

I just got the board today and the red light is solid, and the green light is also solid, but abit dim.

I initially tried several SD cards, flashed from other computers, I even tried an SD card from another known working PI4....nothing worked.

So I put the recovery files on a small SD card flashed as FAT and rebooted. Still nothing... just both lights solid.

Any advise?

[jamesh]

Sounds like a dead board.

As above, the chance of a corrupted EEPROM is infinitesimal.

[masterice]

If the Pi wont boot it may of course be a corrupt/faulty sd card.

I have had two genuine pi Noobs cards from CPC/Farnell this week, both of which refused to boot, simply giving a couple of green led flashes and then nothing.
Consequently I downloaded and wrote my own sd card and that worked straight off.

[Chaosreaper12]

I really don't know if I am doing something wrong but my first 4b board had a corrupted eeprom. I reloaded it. Loaded Ubuntu 20.04 and it booted. Once. Then it ate the card and showed the eeprom error again. Got a second 4b and that came from the factory with the eeprom error. The thing that annoys me is the card it ate was a 400gb Scandisk ultra so it was not cheap. Now my laptop won't recognize it for more than a minute or so. I need to figure this out before I spend any more money into it. My 3b+'s are working fine.

[sspalla]

Hey guys,
I got my brand new RPi4b 8GB and it won't boot. Tried a couple of SD cards and RPi Imager tool, no luck. I'm getting 0x371a0010 error and SD card not detected, as pictured below.
Is there any way to access the board not-through SD card to re-flash firmware/bootloader...?

Any help will be welcomed, thanks in advance.

[DougS]

I have 2 RP4's, a 2 and 4gb, 100% eeprom failure and EVERY reboot - (never had this problem with 20= rpi3s) - will have to return them and wait for a stable version.....

[jamesh]

The chances of this being a bad EEPROM/program on EEPROM is tiny. Absolutely miniscule. So to get two failures its almost certainly nothing to do with the EEPROM.

[cleverca22]

if your seeing the hdmi diagnostics in the last screenshot, that means the EEPROM did its job perfectly, and its unable to load the next stage from sd/usb

the screenshot in this thread says that it should only boot from sd, and the sd has failed, so it just stops, so its not an EEPROM error

[rpdom]

Is there any sign of damage to the contacts in the micro SD card slot on the Pi 4B?