Umbrel WiFi breaks Pi5 - NO BOOT

I am still trying to diagnose and fix my Umbrel install after a failed attempt to connect to WiFi. There has been no help from support and now I have 2 Pi5’s with broken installations, neither of which will connect to my network via ethernet, both of which were running well before the attempt to change to WiFi and failed.

This is clearly an Umbrel problem because I have a 3rd Pi5 which boots from my SD card (bookworm) and I can access via SSH. I’m enormously frustrated that I can’t seem to get any assistance from the Umbrel staff, very concerning to say the least.

Can someone here suggest a config.txt edit or some other method I can use that might force the ethernet to become active so I can recover the hardware and move forward?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Hey @doingbobthings can you elaborate a bit more, sorry I don’t have any context to your earlier issues.

I’m curious what happened. So you enabled wifi using the web UI, attempted to connect to a network, and your lost ethernet access in this process? I think it might be useful to check some logs if it was possible, however I suppose if you can’t access your machines then were out of luck in that area.

I’m wondering why your ethernet was no longer enabled, I can’t remember the conditions for that. I’ll have to do a bit of research if I can.

Exactly. I had to try a couple times to get the WiFi connected and after failing, and then rebooting the install, I now have two Pi5 installs that are borked and I can’t get either to recognize over ethernet. Very troubling, to say the least.

Hm, have you attached a monitor/keyboard to confirm the machine has fully booted? If so would you be able to confirm the network status and go down that route? Otherwise I suppose we may not know if the machine is even alive? Sorry I just want to go to basics here first. If you can get a monitor/keyboard attached you may also be able to get some logs opened up!

Looks like that’s the next step… stand by…

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