Restart card

Hi,
I’ve restarted the nvidia Jetson TX1 and nothing and apart from the Ubuntu background, nothing else appears (no icon,…) after login. I’ve unplugged and then plugged again and I have the same issue. I am a bit panicked, what should I do? Thanks for help

If you have a serial console you’d be able to get a lot more information. The 9-pin D-sub connector uses settings 115200 for speed, 8N1 (flow control off/software or CTS/RTS).

Barring that, if you have something valuable you want to save before trying flashing, you could clone. Clone also gives you a chance to test if eMMC read works correctly. You’d be cloning the root partition (a.k.a., “APP”). To clone see:
[url]http://elinux.org/Jetson/Cloning[/url]

Did the unit just start doing this? Was the Jetson ever get updated by flash? Is there any chance the disk is near full? Does network access via ssh work?

Thanks for your answer. Finally, after an “unplug/plug” , it went ok. Indeed, the disk is quite full to the point that I was unable to open QtCreator, that was actually the reason why I wanted to restart the card.

By the way, I face an other problem-or, more exactly, unconvenience - : after shutting down the card, is it normal that it takes around 30min before it can start again ? I mean,after stopping the card and unplugging the cable, if you plug again, the card should run again, but, as far as I’m concerned, I need to wait around 30 min after a card stop before the “re-plugging” make the card run again. It’s not so dramatic, but a bit annoying. Could you explain me why it happens?
Thanks in advance

Once shut down a Jetson should be able to restart immediately…no delay at all.

Do beware though that if you unplug the power cable without the Jetson being shut down properly you’ll corrupt the file system (never pull the power cable of a running Jetson except in an emergency where proper shutdown can’t work). In some cases journaling may recover things (which is quick), but it’s a risk for data loss. After enough issues repair is required (which takes significant time). There is a difference between taking 30 minutes before the power on button responds, versus 30 minutes of boot time if repair is occurring. To know why this is happening it’s necessary to know if shutdown was performed via command or via cutting power.

I stop the card properly and once it was completely shutted down (cooling fan not rotating yet), I unplug and need to way around 30’ before the plugging makes the card work again…

Now, I also still have a big problem when I start the card. I manage to log in but after that, nothing happens, I just see the Ubuntu background and the mouse pointer without any icon, nor the launcher or even the “shut down” button. So, I always need to use “Brute Force unplugging”… Do you have any solution to help me solve this more than annoying problem ? I really don’t know why this happens because I didn’t do sth special, just frequent pop ups to tell the disk is nearly full and bugs with opening Qt due to disk-nearly-full messages…

Plugging the power would start the TK1 only after about 30 minutes unplugged.
If you need it to start on power on in any case, there is a possibility to remove the supercapacitor but you will lose RTC.

Using power button it should start anyway (fan on). If not, there may be a hardware problem, then I would advise to first try to reflash with last JetPack for confirming this.

For your GUI issue, it might be a video mode mismatch where you would be only seeing the top-left-most corner of the screen. The easiest would be to use another monitor (or another HDMI to DVI adapter, avoiding VGA).
Serial console mentionned by @Linuxdev can also be used to investigate this (search this forum for EDID and xrand, as starting point).

With the serial console you can also look at error messages in /var/log/ files.
This may also be where the disk gets full, when you have many errors these files can be huge.
Check your disk usage with

df -H

and check the size of a directory with du such as

du -sh /var/log

for the previously mentionned folder. Once you’ll have found where space is used, you should be able to clear it.

With serial console you can also shutdown properly with

sudo poweroff

That message about disk being nearly full would explain a lot. Temp files can’t be written, and some are critical, e.g., logging in to X and setting up the desktop settings. The disk needs at least some tiny capacity before a regular user can log in and function. It is probably that the above mentioned serial console would save a lot of effort since it has no such requirement and would let you delete files and explore.

An alternative might be to clone the Jetson, loopback mount the root partition on a desktop PC host, edit that way, then flash using the cloned image. Probably plugging in the serial console is simpler :)

Note on power off: If you have a local keyboard connected you might be able to use magic-sysrq key combinations to still shutdown cleanly. E.g., “alt-sysrq-s” to sync, “alt-sysrq-u” to go read-only mode, “alt-sysrq b” to force boot). See:
[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key[/url]
…on a working system you can demo with sync and watch dmesg as you do.