Skip to main content

Rasperry Pi stuck on login-screen / not booting

Symptoms

A Raspberry Pi with the default Rasbpian or Ubuntu Mate operating system isn't booting/is stuck on the login screen after boot.

Related symptoms

  • -

Details

The issue can be recognized when, after a reboot, the system doesn't automatically log in, but it is stuck on the login screen instead and asks for a password to log in/continue, like in the example image below:

image.png

Cause

This issue might be caused by a full disk. When the disk is full, the Raspberry Pi doesn't boot properly anymore. Also, additional services like TeamViewer, AnyDesk or VNC won't be started, and therefore, the system is completely out of reach. SSH might be the only option to log in to the system remotely.

Solution / Resolution / How To

Log in to the Raspberry PI using SSH, for example, using PuTTY.

Use the command below to check if the disk is full. If so, continue with the next step.

df -h

In the example image, we'll see there are 0 bytes/there's 100% in use, indicating the disk is full.

image.png

Use the command below to find out which directory takes up the most space.

du -h / | grep -E "[0-9]G"

In the example image, we can see that the directory "/home/pi/.config/chromium/Default/Extensions/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm" is occupying too much space. Caused by the "uBlock Origin" extension in the Chromium Browser that comes/came pre-installed on the Raspberry Pi OS Desktop version sometimes.

 

Other folders that can take up a lot of space can sometimes be located in /var/log or /var/log/journal.

 

image.png

Remove the files or/directories taking up a lot of disk space. See the commands below for example.

For a directory:

 

rm -Rf /home/pi/.config/chromium/Default/Extensions/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm

For a file:

 

rm /var/log/syslog

Optionally, find out why the disk space got full and/or if any fixes are available to prevent this.

 

References

Back to top