1.3 crashes with option "silentinstall"

[ak59]

This only happens, when raspberry is connected to internet over Ethernet on start.
In this case the slide show is shown only for a couple of seconds. On first boot crash after partition_setup.sh. Without internet connection on start, the same configuration works perfect.

[lurch]

Confirmed on NOOBS v1.3.2 - it looks like it starts installing automatically (thanks to the silentinstall recovery.cmdline option) but then when the network connection comes up a few seconds later, the installation quits and you just get left staring at the "for recovery mode hold shift" background image.

@Rob-Bishop Maybe the network shouldn't be enabled in the first place if the silentinstall option is being used?

[IvanExpert]

I think this is not exactly as described. The slide show appears and then immediately disappears (I didn't realize it was Ethernet-related), but even without it, the installation does continue and complete, as observable by the flickering of the ACT/OK LED.

However, and I think this is a separate bug, on automatic reboot following silent install, NOOBS crashes, 100% of the time (it says "Recovery Application Crashed" and it dumps you to sh). I don't know whether this is Ethernet-related or not, or whether it's specific to Raspbian installations, which is all that I've tried. Rebooting again at this point works fine.

Same behavior on both 1.3 and 1.3.2.

[lurch]

Ah! I hadn't noticed that the installation does still continue in the background despite the slideshow disappearing, so I just powered-off :-/

[Rob-Bishop]

If someone is able to contribute a fix, I'd happily accept it. Otherwise it's scheduled to be fixed in the next release.

[lurch]

I've found that this bug can be triggered in a different way (tested using the latest dev branch) - if you start installing an OS from a full-NOOBS card, and then once the install has started (i.e. the slideshow is being displayed) you then plug in a network cable, the slideshow window disappears, the installation continues in the background, and the recovery application crashes when it gets to the end of the installation.

Re-opening but tagging it as minor, as it's probably an unlikely situation.

[IvanExpert]

Another unlikely situation in which this can be triggered is where you have a single OS installed (in my case, I'm using my custom Raspple II distribution, at http://appleii.ivanx.com/rasppleii), with Ethernet connected, and you press shift to get to get to the reinstallation menu on startup. You'll see the OS you have already installed listed alone, and then it takes a couple of seconds for the rest of the network-only distributions to appear. If, in that moment before they appear, you press "I" and return to start the install, you'll get the same behavior -- slide show for a brief moment, and then it vanishes, followed by a crash to sh once the install is completed.

This makes me think the silentinstall bug might somehow be related to NOOBS expecting the distro menu, or a specific member of it, to be populated.

(I don't know whether this has been addressed by the fix mentioned above because I've been unable to build NOOBS per the guidance in the docs, unfortunately.)

UPDATE: I was able to build NOOBS at the checkout where the fix went in for silentinstall, and it also fixed this unlikely situation, so this comment should be considered not an issue.

[lurch]

I've been unable to build NOOBS per the guidance in the docs, unfortunately.

Would you mind opening a separate bug for that, providing more details please? (error messages, etc.)

[IvanExpert]

I did so, and was able to build a newer NOOBS (by installing libqt4-dev). I can confirm that the slides stay up during silentinstall.

[IvanExpert]

One side effect of the fix (where Ethernet is disabled for silentinstall) is that it also appears to be disabled if you press Shift during startup to get to the installation menu, meaning that other OS options aren't available to install from the internet. This is probably preferable for my own needs, but I thought I'd mention it in case it wasn't desired behavior.