Broken MicroSD slot on Raspberry Pi

[balanga]

I have a Raspberry Pi which does not retain a card in place when it is inserted and am unable to boot. With Raspbian I do get the rainbow screen being shown but then nothing else. If I try FreeBSD and attach a serial cable should I expect to see any output?

 

[ralphbsz]

I don't understand. If the SD card is not retained, then there is de-facto no SD card in the Pi. Why would it make a difference whether the card that is not in there is a Raspbian, FreeBSD or purple elefant card? By "Rainbow Screen" I presume you mean the screen that has all the colors in a big rectangle or square? If I remember right, that comes up if there is no readable boot image, so boot does not go on. Which matches your description that there is no SD card in the slot.

Have you tried some tape (masking tape, scotch tape) to hold the card in?

 

[Phishfry]

You should be able to boot off a USB stick with newer uboot. Maybe -CURRENT is needed..
How did you come to pick uboot 1.2 (Dated 2017) for your recent GoFlex project?
Does it support USB booting?

 

[balanga]

You should be able to boot off a USB stick with newer uboot. Maybe -CURRENT is needed..

Not sure I understand. Can I install a uboot in an RPI?

I connected up a serial cable to my broken RPi but didn't see any output.

How did you come to pick uboot 1.2 (Dated 2017) for your recent GoFlex project?
Does it support USB booting?

Are you referring to:-

## Starting application at 0x01000098 ...
Consoles: U-Boot console

Compatible U-Boot API signature found @0x7b12860

FreeBSD/arm U-Boot loader, Revision 1.2

(Thu Nov 30 14:06:37 GMT 2017 root@Test)

That is FreeBSD's ubldr. The uboot I'm using on GoFlex home is

U-Boot 2017.05-tld-2 (Jul 26 2017 - 02:37:42 -0700)

This particular uboot allows me to boot either FreeBSD, Debian or Archlinux from USB (or HDD) dependent on the contents of /boot/uEnv.txt on external media or OpenWrt from Flash if this file is not present.