I have been having some stability issues with my EON. After what appears to be a random period of uptime, the EON just stops responding. When I discover it in this state, here is what I find…
- It responds to pings.
- VNC is stopped.
- Cannot connect via SSH.
- The OLED stops cycling screens.
- Nothing will launch from the GUI.
I am able to perform an orderly shutdown via the power switch and when it comes back up, I cannot find anything in any of the logs. It’s like it just stops writing to the NVMe drive completely. Sometimes it’s up for over a week and other times, it does this after a few hours.
To troubleshoot further, I connected a KVM and display and waited for it to do its thing. I left a journalctl -f
running to see if anything logged right before this. It just did it again and nothing in the log. From the console, nothing would launch. The default icons (browser, file manager, and terminal) in the menu bar were replaced with some strange “dead” icons.
I’m suspecting the NVMe to USB adapter I’m using is the issue. It’s as if the boot/rootfs just “goes away” and the EON tries to keep running. I pulled the adapter and plugged it into another Pi and it would not mount. I plugged it into my (Windows) laptop and it went through a “found new hardware/hardware removed” cycle about six times in just a few seconds. It ended up “thinking” the drive was plugged in but neither the GUI nor diskpart saw it. At this point, no matter where I plug it in, nothing sees it.
I searched the forum threads here and found a few mentions of similar behavior where the EON just stops responding and only a power cycle will bring it back. @BlackRose67 had a similar experience. I wonder if this is the same issue.
This is the adapter I’m using. I’ve read a number of threads regarding complaints about heat from these adapters so I did sandwich a thermal pad between the drive and the adapter. I suspect the thing may have cooked itself. I wonder if the use case for these adapters is something like a one time data recovery and they are just not built to run continuously. Maybe I just got a bad one…don’t really know.
So…anyone have similar experiences?