Failed to boot to SD - Intermittent

Yikes. The issue with the failing reboot popped up with a couple of other Pi4s. The latest release was supposed to fix that. At least the developer messages for changes made to the Pi4 EEPROM suggested that.

The EEPROM firmware you’re using is pretty new (April 2021), so I guess this is already running the latest info-beamer release. c03112 decodes to a Pi 4B rev 2 4096MB, so it’s one of those older revision 2 boards, but according to this statement, the April version of the firmware fixed that.

What’s a bit puzzling is the first screenshot. It suggest that the Pi was able to boot at least a bit before it could no longer read from the SD stopped. For those log message to appear on the screen, at least start_x.elf, kernel8.img and initramfs.lzma must have been read successfully. It’s odd that the SD card then fails. Do all the devices with that problem use the same type of SD card? Do you have another vendor/model you might temporarily try instead? That way we could rule out a bad batch of cards.

Another followup observation: The first screenshot shows a situation that can potentially self-recover: Can’t look it up right now, but I think after 60 seconds, the Pi should reboot in that case.

The second screenshot shows the Pi4 bootloader/HDMI diagnostics screen. The EEPROM configuration applied by info-beamer OS endlessly tries to restart booting from the SD card (It’s the f1 you see in the output, read from right to left, 1 means “try to boot from SD”, f means start from the beginning again). Right now there’s no limit on the number of attempts made. There is a way to maybe change this in a future OS release: The MAX_RESTARTS value can put a limit on the number of boot attempts before the Pi is forcefully rebooted and it might have more luck on its next boot. But of course that’s all not fixing the root cause.