Off topic

[Alastair L]

Apologies in advance for this off topic question, but I'm sure someone out there has had  a similar issue and solved it.  

My RPi4 ran both Weewx and a program to monitor my solar panels.  The Pi died and I've finally managed to get a replacement.  Unfortunately when I transfer the SSD card to the new Pi4 I get the messages  “start4x.elf not compatible” and “this board requires newer software”.  It appears that the replacement RPi requires new firmware.  I tried running  update the firmware, use sudo rpi-eeprom-update -d -a  using an other 'old' RPi4 but I still get the same  error.      

I could of course start again with a fresh OS installation.  Weewx is not the issue as it's relatively straightforward to retrieve my history,  but it's the solar panel monitoring program that stops me doing this as I would lose my entire history - I cannot figure out where it saves its history to as it appears to save data in hidden folders.

My question is, is there a way update my SSD card to allow it to run on the newer RPI4  without a full re-install?

Thanks

[Greg Troxel]

Alastair L <ajan...@gmail.com> writes:

> Apologies in advance for this off topic question, but I'm sure someone out
> there has had a similar issue and solved it.

It is but many struggle with RPIs.

My advice is

0) Ask this in RPI-land instead.
1) first image the card you have, saving it
2) figure out and implement a backup strategy for your data
3) get another card, and do an install
4) mount it someplace and look at the files in the boot partition and
see which is different from the card that was in the machine that
broke. It is possible that your old system hasn't gotten the new
packages.
5) think about using other small computers that are less pesky than the
RPI. I like the PC engines apu2 series, but last I checked they too
were having supply chain issues.

[Peter Fletcher]

It sounds as if your weewx/solar Pi installation was one or (probably) two versions behind the current ('Bullseye') version of the Pi's Debian-based OS. While it may be possible to upgrade the OS 'around' the existing installed programs, it would take a lot more Linux knowledge than I am guessing you have, and would not be guaranteed to work - either in the short or in the long term. The right solution (in addition to implementing a better backup strategy, going forward!) is almost certainly to be to install the latest version of the OS on a new SD Card, reinstall weewx and your solar monitoring program, and migrate your data.

weewx is easy! All the data is stored in its database - presumably weewx.sdb, in your case.

The solar monitoring program is obviously the issue. I assume that you didn't write it yourself, or you would know where it stores its data. Where did you get it? How did you originally install it? Was/is there no documentation? I assume that you know what it is called - I would try doing a Google search for '[program name] data location', and/or '[program name] migrate data'. In any event, unless this produces an easy answer, your best bet for knowledgeable further help is likely to be The Raspberry PI User forums.

[Alastair]

To anyone in a similar predicament, this worked perfectly for me:

https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/77191

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