Ways to recover corrupted boot

Hi again everyone

I messed up with installing some modules in my !Boot directory and my desktop will not respond at all on the Pi 3. It boots to see the Icon Bar and the Icon on the right but nothing else works apart from Alt and break which doesn’t do anything if I close the program. My question is, would there be a way to try and remove these files I have installed with these problems I am facing? Thanks.

Hi Jay
Ouch! Sorry to hear about that.

Can you get anything to work on your Desktop at all? If so, I suggest just deleting your Boot folder entirely and just copy and paste a new one from the ROOL site to the root of your SD Card as before. You will need to unzip it first using SparkFS or you can use the self-extracting version if you find that easier.

If you can’t do anything on your desktop, can you at least go the command line by pressing F12? You could then delete the Boot folder manually.

Hopefully that helps a bit. Let me know how it goes, or if you need anything else.

I’ve edited my post based on it being 100% wrong for Pi users. Chris’ info below is what you want.

RISC OS is great once you’ve overcome it’s little differences.

If you are running a standard Pi distribution (eg. RC14 or RC15) then do not delete !Boot; this will also wipe the ROM and render the machine completely unbootable. It’s only safe to delete !Boot if it’s on a different drive.

@Jay, when you turn the machine on hit escape untill it stops booting to the desktop, then use the appropriate *commands to find and remove the offending modules.

@Chris, the partition would still remain, so even if the files in !loader were removed you could replace them via another OS to get a booting system and recover your files.

@Chris, the partition would still remain, so even if the files in !loader were removed you could replace them via another OS to get a booting system and recover your files.

True, but deleting the files would definitely still stop the Pi from booting and, as you say, would require moving the card into a different machine. Much better to hammer Esc and selectively tidy up the offending files :)

As Mike says, hammer ESC when booting.

Back in the good old days, you could hold * on the keypad to go straight to a supervisor prompt or SHIFT to bypass the boot sequence and go to the desktop. I don’t believe these work any more, possibly due to when USB is initialised in the boot sequence and/or when the test for the keys is done..or they were simply removed.

I think I read that ROOL wants to restore “boot keys” functionality for OS 5.24.

Thanks everyone, got it working again. Did the ESC at boot and found the file which was corrupting the start up. Thanks again, Appreciated.