balena-cli/TROUBLESHOOTING.md

Troubleshooting

This document contains common issues related to the balena CLI, and how to fix them.

After burning to an sdcard, my device doesn't boot

• The downloaded image is not complete (download was interrupted).

Please clean the cache (%HOME/.balena/cache or C:\Users\<user>\_balena\cache) and run the command again. In the future, the CLI will check that the image is not complete and clean the cache for you.

I get a permission error when burning to an sdcard

• The SDCard is locked.

I get EINVAL errors on Cygwin

The errors look something like this:

net.js:156
    this._handle.open(options.fd);
                 ^
Error: EINVAL, invalid argument
  at new Socket (net.js:156:18)
  at process.stdin (node.js:664:19)
  at Object.Interface.createInterface (C:\cygwin\home\Juan Cruz Viotti\Projects\balena-cli\node_modules\inquirer\node_modules\readline2\index.js:31:43)
  at PromptUI.UI (C:\cygwin\home\Juan Cruz Viotti\Projects\balena-cli\node_modules\inquirer\lib\ui\baseUI.js:23:40)
  at new PromptUI (C:\cygwin\home\Juan Cruz Viotti\Projects\balena-cli\node_modules\inquirer\lib\ui\prompt.js:26:8)
  at Object.promptModule [as prompt] (C:\cygwin\home\Juan Cruz Viotti\Projects\balena-cli\node_modules\inquirer\lib\inquirer.js:27:14)

• Some interactive widgets don't work on Cygwin. If you're running Windows, it's preferrable that you use cmd.exe, as Cygwin is not official supported by Node.js.

I get Invalid MBR boot signature when configuring a device

This error, accompanied with something like: Expected 0xAA55, but saw 0x29FE usually indicates a corrupted device operating system image in the cache, due to bad a internet connection during the download process.

Try clearing the cache with the following command and trying again:

$ rm -rf $HOME/.balena/cache

Or in Windows:

> del /s /q %UserProfile%\_balena\cache

I get EACCES: permission denied when logging in

The balena CLI stores the session token in $HOME/.balena or C:\Users\<user>\_balena in UNIX based operating systems and Windows respectively. This error usually indicates that the user doesn't have permissions over that directory, which can happen if you ran the balena CLI as root, and thus the directory got owned by him.

Try resetting the ownership by running:

$ sudo chown -R <user> $HOME/.balena