The Industrial Raspberry Pi Forum

Hi,

When using ImageBakery to customize an image from a Raspbian Stretch Lite image, after burning the customized image im getting kernel errors and the console cant be reached because the root account is locked.

My base image: 2019-04-08-raspbian-stretch-lite.img
Steps:
1. copied the base image to a working RPi (running clean stretch-lite).
2. Copied the Image bakery repo.
3. Ran the customize_image.sh script.
4. Burned the resulting image onto a RevPI.

Is there anything I'm missing here ? Is there maybe a guide as to how to manually install the needed packages & kernel on the stretch-lite?

Thanks.

Short answer:

The most likely cause is a bug in the libfdisk1 package. You can work around the bug by downloading a fixed version of libfdisk1 from our apt repository and installing it on the machine on which you're invoking customize_image.sh:
https://packages.revolutionpi.de/pool/m ... _armhf.deb
Alternatively, if the machine is a RevPi product (such that /etc/apt/sources.list.d/revpi.list is present), invoke "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade" to install the fixed version along with any other available updates. Yet another alternative is to run customize_image.sh on a 64-bit machine (such as a x86-64 Linux box).

Long answer:

At the end of customize_image.sh, the image is shrunk by invoking sfdisk. That command is linked against libfdisk.so.1, which contains a bug in Raspbian stretch wherein the 32-bit disk identifier cannot be parsed if the most significant bit is set. The disk identifier of 2019-04-08-raspbian-stretch-lite.img is 0xc1dc39e5, so the most significant bit is set. Because the disk identifier cannot be parsed, sfdisk writes a new random disk identifier to the boot sector of the image. You can tell that the bug has occurred by comparing the two disk identifiers in the customize_image.sh output:
The wrong disk identifier prevents the machine from booting because it is used in /etc/fstab to mount the /boot partition:
The bug was fixed in February 2019 with commit 834b3d07e498. The first release of the libfdisk1 package containing this commit is v2.34, which will be in Raspbian bullseye. We've compiled a custom version of the libfdisk1 package which contains the commit but is otherwise identical to the one shipped with Raspbian stretch (2.29.2-1+deb9u1). The package is automatically installed on a customized image because customize_image.sh invokes apt-get upgrade. The package is necessary because on the first boot, revpi-factory-reset invokes sfdisk to grow the image to the eMMC size.

Great, thank you very much for the detailed answer!

Hi Ecoman,

Can I ask you how small you managed to make your RevPi image ?

Regards
Koen