Risc OS not booting on Pi Zero - hanging on ethernet search screen

I have a number of non-wifi Pi zero cards, both the v1.2 and v1.3 variants. I also have a number of fresh RO 5.28 and 5.23 MicroSD cards to boot them with. These cards have all worked fine with full-size Pi 2/3/400s etc
However, with the Pi Zero they all hang when they get to the ethernet search stage in the opening screen, instead of continuing with the boot process after 10-15 seconds.

I only have a screen and power connected up to each Pi Zero ATM as I’m waiting for some hubs and OTG adapter leads to arrive. I don’t see how that could affect things though – when I replicate that setup with a full-size Pi 3B, Risc OS just continues booting to the desktop as normal.

So where am I going wrong?

I have never had a Pi Zero, but does the Zero even have any networking hardware? The answer might be as simple as disabling networking, and perhaps ShareFS too, in a working Pi before putting the card in the Zero.

That is distinctly inconvenient if the requirent is to be able to freely swap cards.

It does sound like a bit of a bug, if no networking is found it would be good if the boot continued.

Networking will have to be disabled before putting the card in the Zero, unless you’ve got a USB Ethernet dongle attached.

Thanks guys, disabling networking did the trick.
Yes, it would make sense if there was a timeout as you say, DP. It would save Zero noobs like me wasting a day trying to get things up and running.

Although I’ve now got the desktop booting up reliably (after disabling networking), I now have another problem.

Everything works except the keyboard. The mouse works fine but there’s no response to keypresses. I’ve tried a number of Zeroes, a number of keyboards, difference PSUs, different microSD cards, different hubs, RO 5.28 and RO 5.23, but no keypresses showing up. Anyone experienced this problem or have any ideas?

If it helps I’m using a hub advertised on eBay as “3 in 1 Male to Female Dual Micro Host OTG Hub Adapter Cable USB 2.0 For Samsung”, item number 384425591819. I have three of them and I’ve tried them all. I’ve also tried them both powered and unpowered.

I have some non-OTG hubs but unfortunately have no micro USB adapters for them at the moment.

USBinfo doesn’t show anything when I plug a keyboard into the hub although it shows the mouse arriving.

As a tempory messure for you keyboard problems you could use my virtual keybaord Vkeyboard:

http://kevsoft.co.uk/#Vkeyboard

Having acquired some micro adapter cables and using using a standard, non-OTG hub, everything is now working fine. I assume the Zero must have one OTG socket (for power supply) and the other is a standard socket that just happens to be micro sized. Kind of a weird set-up but that’s the only explanation I can think of.

That is indeed how it works! TippEx recommended.

David J Ruck said: ‘Networking will have to be disabled before putting the card in the Zero, unless you’ve got a USB Ethernet dongle attached.’

Could anyone give a link that gives info on how to do that?
The zero 2W I have won’t boot with ro528-1875M.img on the sd card.

Put the card in another Pi. Double-click !Boot, click the Network icon, untick the check boxes under Access and Internet and Save.

Thanks Stuart but I only have the one pi.

The zero 2W I have won’t boot with ro528-1875M.img on the sd card

I’m not sure the Zero 2W fully works on 5.28 but should on the latest 5.29 ROM availabe from the downloads section.

You can put the SD Card ion a PC and download the Beta 5.29 ROM image and install that on the partition.

Also you may need the latest Pi firmware
as well.

Thanks to a rash of boot-up problems affecting recent Pi hardware revisions, I’ve put a first attempt at a Raspberry Pi boot issues wiki page online. For example the “Boot stops at Contacting DHCP server” section should cover how to disable networking in an understandable fashion.

Comments welcome.¹

¹ If you do spot any egregious errors, don’t stand on ceremony: just update the wiki page.

Doug Webb wrote: ‘download the Beta 5.29 ROM image and install that on the partition’

Can I check I’m about to do the right thing here?

When I created the sd card from ro528-1875M.img, two partitions were created. Putting the card in my linux machine I see:

sdb 8:16 1 29.7G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 1 48M 0 part
└─sdb4 8:20 1 1.8G 0 part

Having now downloaded the Nightly Build Beta RPi Rom, should I literally copy it to the sdb4 partition? Something like:

$ sudo dd if=riscos.img of=/dev/sdb4

Or should I dd it to /dev/sdb in the same way as I did with ro528-1875M.img?

riscos.img is the RISC OS ROM, a single file. The beta download needs to replace the file of the same name in the smaller partition.

>replace the file of the same name
Thanks David. I have a bootable system now.

I have a bootable system now.

Thats good to hear, sorry I didnt come back to you as somehow I missed your return post.