Just a few days ago I realized that the Raspberry PI I use to control my irrigation system was dead. Could not get to the web interface, pings would time out, could not ssh into it.

The first thing I tried was a simple reboot. The raspberry is in a black box in my backyard, maybe the hot summer days were... too hot? I have a cron job that shuts it down if the temperature goes above 70 degrees. Or maybe the shady wireless card and its driver stopped working? I have another cron job to restart it, so this seems less likely.

So.. I reboot it by phyiscally unplugging it, but still nothing happens. The red led on the board, next to the ethernet plug is on, which means it is getting power. The green led next to it flashes only once. By reading online, this led can flash to report an error, or to indicate that the memory card is being read.

There is no error corresponding to one, single, flash, so I assume it means that it tried to read the flash, and somehow failed. It is supposed to be booting now, so I would expect much more activity from the memory card.

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