I thought I was buying the best… I have a RPi5 16GB in a Pironman5 Max case with an NVME drive and can only get it to boot about once every 15-20 times. My CoPilot gives me advice which never works, and now wants me to take the Pi out of the case entirely to check the power out of the case.
I have gone through every power supply made for the Raspberry Pi 5, and nothing seems to make a difference…
I REALLY need some help - does anyone have any good advice for me? I don’t want to completely disassemble this case…
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I had a similar issue and struggle on every step for a couple of weeks till i eventually have everything up and running. I documented all of the steps I took to get bookworm 64bit lite going up to nextcloud running with 2 external SSD. I am traveling till Monday so I don’t have access to my procedure but happy to share it with you when I get back.
Hey, Bill! Sounds like that irritating TV ad, sorry… Anyway, thanks for sharing! Have a good trip - I’lll be looking forward to trying out your method!!
Terry Hamilton
I had the reboot issues and sunfounder told me Bookworm 64-bit Lite (headless version. This worked but found if I did an update and upgrade right away it would fail reboot, not sure why. I was able to to the upgrade later in the process and no reboot issues.
I found i had to format and mount the SSD drives early in the process or nextcloud 2asalmost impossible to connect to them.
Thank you for the detailed description. From what you described (booting successfully once every 15–20 attempts), this is usually related to power stability or NVMe initialization, rather than a hardware failure.
A few quick checks that do not require disassembling the case:
Check for power throttling
Run:
vcgencmd get_throttled
If the value is not 0x0, it indicates the Pi experienced power issues.
Confirm the NVMe drive is detected
Run:
lsblk
You should see something like nvme0n1.
Check PCIe detection
Run:
lspci
You should see an NVMe controller listed.
Confirm EEPROM boot order
sudo rpi-eeprom-config
Recommended boot order for NVMe boot:
BOOT_ORDER=0xf416
Also, please confirm which NVMe SSD model and power supply you are using.
Some high-performance NVMe drives require more power during initialization and may cause unstable boot behavior on Raspberry Pi 5 systems.
Once we have this information, we can help identify the exact cause and suggest a fix.
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Oh, Thank you, thank you! I am extremely grateful to you and others who have replied! I shall try out all of those things as soon as I get this thing to boot up. I can sometimes see the beginning of a splash screen flash up for about 11/2 seconds before going black. I even read a sentence once, " If you haven’t done so already, press spacebar to…" and then nothing. I could see the graphic of a Raspberry for about a second. Thanks again
I had the same problems with Copilot, I lost days and days because of bad advice. So I’m not using it anymore. I hope you get your Pi5.