MiSTer FPGA Forum

I used to be able to go to the console by pressing F9. Now when I press F9 I just get a blank screen which a blinking cursor..

It works for me. Try it immediately after a reboot. Try logging in via ssh. Do either of those work?

It always work via ssh for me. I tried immediately after a reboot and it is still not working, even if I power off MISTer.
Something real strange is going on:
Normally I use ssh but today for I decided to use F9.
I use a USB HDD and I made some scripts to keep my HDD spinning but today I just noticed it stopped spinning. I wanted to use F9 to check what was going on without having to start my PC.
To have the script start automatically I have a script in /etc/Init.d called S99spin which starts the real "spinning" script /media/fat/Spin, I did not use Spin.sh in order to "hide" it from the Scripts menu. The "spinning" script was not running. If I ssh, cd to /etc/init.d and type ./S99spin the "spinning" script starts properly.
F9 and the spin scripts used to work properly until very recently. I just noticed it today but I am not sure when it started. It can only be in the last few days. I am perplexed.
My MISTer is almost up to date, I am just missing today's update of Main and C64.
I doubt this has anything to do with the spinning script, may bge for F9 but it hard to tell:

Main:
- OSD: backspace to clear FC option.
- Add OSD_MSG flag for non-interactive windows (for cores having pause when OSD is open).
- input: fix wrong dir creation.
I have no idea what these 3 fixes are about and I guess only God knows.

Didn't work for me when I tried a couple of weeks ago. I always SSH in but F9 worked once for me but the others (rare) times I have tried I get no response at all.

Do you get a blank screen with a blinking cursor?

Nothing at all. Stays on the menu.

I started to redo my SD card, I did not have much time during lunch break but I made the initial install with the latest Mr. Fusion (2.2). F9 works properly, I did not have time to setup my "spinner" scripts but I expect it will work. After that I will have to do the updates. If I use the update scripts it will update to the latest and if at that point it breaks F9 and "spinner" I will have no way to know when it happened (although I know it happened very recently).

What is the procedure to update Linux, MISTer and Menu step by step, not all at once using the update scripts to the latest, so I can figure out when it happened? For MISTer and Menu I can just copy them other but I am not sure for Linux, I don't even remember if there was a Linux update since Mr. Fusion 2.2.

Back into business
As stated earlier I decided to redo my SD card using Mr. Fusion 2.2.
As I also use the "Switch to USB" function I have almost everything on the USB HDD: cores, roms, configs ... On the SD card I have Linux, MISTer, Menu and not much else.
After the install I "Switched to USB", installed my scripts to keep my HDD spinning, removed the noexec usbmount option in order to be able to run scripts from the HDD, setup my networking back to fixed IP.
At this point F9 was working and my "Spinner" script running.
Now, time to update. I started just by the normal update script which updated Linux, MISTer, Menu, C64 and a few arcades.
As Linux had been updated I had to redo my settings for the "Spinner" script, the usbmount options and the fixed IP.
At this stage my MISTer was still behaving properly.
Next I ran the update all script which did not update much as I had everything updated on my USB drive 2 days ago.
MISTer is still behaving properly.
So something was broken on my SD card and it was only in the last few days. I discovered it yesterday when F9 was not working any longer, trying to investigate I also discovered that my "spinner" script was not running which also explained why, in the last few days, WinSCP had sometimes trouble to connect with a waiting screen popping up but the connection always succeeded (after the HDD was spinning).
I never had an SD card corruption before and this problem is very strange as MISTer was basically functioning properly.
Trying to think was could have happened a light bulb suddenly lit: SAM!
In the last few days I installed SAM A.K.A MiSTer Super Attract Mode, after install I tried to run it but nothing happened. So I wonder if something happened in the shadows and broke something. May be SAM hates Switched to USB.
SAM will stay in its repository and I hope that my MISTer will have a happy life thereafter.