Solve: The Raspberry Pi, the SSD, and the Splash Screen of Doom

Solve: The Raspberry Pi, the SSD, and the Splash Screen of Doom

There’s a special kind of heartbreak in the Raspberry Pi world: the kind that boots once, teases you with success, then leaves you staring at a frozen Kodi logo while your coffee goes cold. Our friend Phil ran into this exact trap when he upgraded from a trusty 16GB USB 2.0 stick to a 120GB SSD on a shiny USB 3.0 adapter. First boot went great. Kodi launched. No resize. He rebooted. It never came back.

We’ve all been there.

At first glance, this felt like a LibreELEC quirk. The OS should resize its root filesystem on first boot to take advantage of all that extra SSD space. But when that doesn’t happen—and when rebooting turns success into splash screen purgatory—it’s often a sign of deeper trouble. Partition confusion. Power issues. Or, in Phil’s case, maybe a dongle that only behaves when it’s flirting with macOS.

We suspected filesystem corruption caused by a bad shutdown. Or maybe a sketchy SATA-to-USB adapter silently dropping power when the Pi ramps up disk activity. The classic fix is to do a full dd if=/dev/zero wipe before re-imaging the drive. But even that didn’t help Phil. Every new image failed, regardless of OS version. Even the previously working flash drive showed signs of trauma. And don’t forget: all of this was on a Pi 4 that had worked great the day before.

When all else fails? Start looking upstream. Power supplies, USB adapters, and even cables can introduce chaos. A Pi 4 with a slightly weak PSU might boot, but then brown out the moment the SSD tries to stretch its legs. A dongle that works fine on a Mac might not hold voltage steady under UAS mode on the Pi. And if you’re unlucky, LibreELEC won’t tell you—it’ll just freeze and wait for a miracle.

Phil’s next move? Dual booting with PINN, throwing RetroPie into the mix, and maybe giving the SSD a second life. And that’s the real lesson here: with Raspberry Pi builds, perseverance is the OS you’re actually running.

Got a splash screen saga of your own? You’re not alone. Share it. Troubleshoot it. And maybe laugh about it a little later—once your system boots again.

When users are creating their own bootable partition managers to fix their media center builds, the problem isn’t user error—it’s product design.

Useful Commands for Diagnosing SSD Boot Issues 

Bash

# Check partition layout after flashing LibreELEC 
lsblk 
sudo parted /dev/sda print 

# Resize root partition manually (if LibreELEC didn't) 
sudo parted /dev/sda resizepart 2 100% 
sudo resize2fs /dev/sda2 

# Zero out SSD before reimaging (avoids leftover junk) 
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4M status=progress 

# Look for voltage issues in kernel logs 
dmesg | grep -i voltage

# Safely shut down the Pi 
sudo shutdown now 

# Or use the built-in Kodi menu: 
Power > Shutdown    

Full Troubleshooting Toolkit on GitHub Gist

We’ve bundled these commands—plus extra diagnostics, error decoding, dmesg output examples, and community tips—into a full Raspberry Pi boot recovery toolkit on Github Gist:

🔗 Raspberry Pi SSD Boot Troubleshooting Toolkit

It includes:

• pi_usb_boot_toolkit.md: main commands and survival guide
• pi_usb_boot_toolkit_notes.md: error output examples, logs, and known failure explanations
• README.md: overview and usage tips

Bookmark it now. You’ll need it when the splash screen returns. 😉

Need Raspberry Pi Expertise?

We'd love to help you with your Raspberry Pi projects.  Feel free to reach out to us at info@pacificw.com.

Written by Aaron Rose, software engineer and technology writer at Tech-Reader.blog.