Sudden Undervoltage Issue and all data on HDD lost

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1

Hi to all. I had a big issue, I’d like to understand if you have never experienced it.
Powering on the system I had a new undervoltage dection symbol on the screen (never had before). I detached everything from the RPI (even the screen and the vent attached to GPIO, the USB HDD 1 TB, keyboard receiver, etc). The RPI continued to give me undervoltage signal… I checked everything… reconnected all and the problem disappeared.
It caused all my data on the external HDD 1 TB to be deleted (fortunately I have a backup in another HDD). I thought it was the HDD absorbing too much current, but also detaching it from RPI the undervoltage sign was still there.
Really can’t understand what happend. The external 7inch Waveshare display has its own power supply (5V,1A dedicated power supplier).
On usb ports I have these devices attached:

  1. USB keyboard receiver;
  2. Ifi Hip dac 2 DAC (with its own power supplier)
  3. 1TB Toshiba HDD;
  4. USB cable for touch function.
  5. HDMI to the display.

Have you ever experienced this sudden undervoltage issue?

My power supply is 5v 3A with on/off switch.

Thanks again for your kindness…

Alessandro.

2

We are seeing such reports lately, and we are trying also to figure out why that happens.

What model of PI do you have?

3

RPI 4 8gb

4

Are you able to provide the model of the PI? The HW revision?

5

excecute one of these commands:

pinout
cat /proc/cpuinfo
cat /proc/device-tree/model
6

The RPI was bought just on Jan 2022, … tell me how to find the info you need and I will do it immediatly…

7

image
image1293×910 55.4 KB

and for cat /proc/device-tree/model:

Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.4v

8

Michelangelo do you need other infos?
Is the problem already known by you? Do you know if other people experienced it?

9

search the forum, you’re one of many. But till now it’s not exactly clear what is happening, other than assumptions.

10

that’s a bad news…

11

This is reason I haven’t bought any RPi. When I built my Volumio system I chose Asus Tinkerboard over Pi. As long as I remember, my friends have had power related issues since RPi 1! Not in Volumio system but in general. RPi 4 had very shaky and rough release due to power and overheating issues. The whole point of RPi is: it is built to price point and popularity. ASUS boards are not vert popular, but quality and stability seems to be much better. Now when ASUS Tinker board 2 is out, its first board is still much more popular.

Good tip for reducing power related problems - Please use good quality power supplies. 5V 2.5A usb charger is not good power supply, it is for charging batteries and hence don’t usually provide very stable and well filtered output. It must provide raw power. Well filtered and very stable output is not needed for charging, devices themselves do regulation and filtering if necessary and suitable for battery type. I use 30W - 5V 6A PSU for my tinker board. My psu even has factory ferrite bead on output and putting AM radio near it registers only silence, phone chargers are usually vert noisy near AM radios. My PSU was something 12€ in aliexpress, nothing fancy just good quality DC psu.

12

Today same issue powering on Volumio… Rebooting the system doesn’t solve the issue ( the system restarts with the same issue). I needed to shutdown Volumio, power off and then power on again (the issue disappears)… In my opinion the root causes could be 2:

  1. Raspberry internal problem;
  2. Power supply… but why it works for hours with no problem and then only in the powering on the system should it not supply enough power? :face_with_raised_eyebrow:
13

Just to be sure, if you disconnect everything, so just the rPi, SD and Network cable, you still have this issue?

14

Just powered on the system with everything attached… no issues… The problem occurs randomly, tomorrow I will receive the official Raspberry power supplier… hoping it’s a PSU issue.

15

That was not what I did ask. If you just keep doing the same it will be hard to isolate what is causing the issue. If you also receive the flashing bolt when nothing attached, it’s either the rPi or the PSU that causes the issue.

16

Understood. Already done. When the problem occured (flashing bolt) I detached everything from the RPI and kept only an external screen on hdmi to check the bolt (19 inch)… the bolt continued to be on the screen and the red led on rpi struggling to flash.

17

Are you able to switch the PSU? If so please attach a different PSU, preferred 5.1V/2,5-3A

18

Tomorrow I will try the raspberry original PSU… hoping it will solve the issue

19

I was having the same issue with my Pi3, depending on what PSU I was using, since I got an official raspberry PSU it has not been an issue.
With other USB powered devices I often find a PSU will stop providing them with enough power over time and needs to be replaced.

20

Hi Volumio guys!.. yes I can confirm… moving to original Raspberry PSU the problem never happened again… hoping it will no happen anymore…

Alessandro.