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One and the same Pi4 (with the same power plug, ethernet cable, and HDMI cable, connected to all the same devices) boots up and works just fine in one room of my apartment, but if I move it to its intended place, it crashes with a kernel panic on boot.

*flips-desk*
in reply to muesli

penguin42
penguin42
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Have you tried a bisect and move it half way between the two?
in reply to muesli

Softwarewolf
Softwarewolf
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Loose solder affected by temperature or humidity difference in location?
in reply to Softwarewolf

muesli
muesli
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Not impossible, but I moved it back and forth at least 5 times now and it's 100% reproducible so far.
in reply to muesli

Softwarewolf
Softwarewolf
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Hmm, that is a strange one. Difference in network connectivity perhaps?
in reply to Softwarewolf

muesli
muesli
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One of my first guesses, too. Used an extra long ethernet cable so I could keep it connected to the same switch & port in both rooms.
in reply to muesli

jokeyrhyme
jokeyrhyme
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one of these locations is a portal to the Upside-Down
in reply to muesli

penguin42
penguin42
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So seriously, depending on the oops, I guess it could be different wifi/bluetooth devices in that area?
in reply to muesli

muesli
muesli
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Ok, different power plug and it suddenly works now. The original plug only works in that one specific room. I'm tempted to debug this properly...
in reply to muesli

GoatsLive
GoatsLive
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That's weird. Wondering of there's a problem with the neutral in the original plug socket?
in reply to muesli

openeryze
openeryze
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dang i'm too late, i was gonna say, aliens in computers are usually in the power supply :P
they can be marginal, so work conditionally, and their issues tend to manifest in mysterious ways
in reply to muesli

Michael K Johnson
Michael K Johnson
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Last time I had something like that, I discovered that the electrician had forgotten to tighten the screws on one of the hot wires in an outlet and it was pretty badly sparked and pitted before I bought a new outlet, trimmed off the damaged wire, and fixed the problem.
in reply to muesli

Pluvia
Pluvia
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Clearly the colour of the electricity in the other room is wrong. Pi only runs on purple-green checkered electricity.
in reply to muesli

Senior Rabbit-Hole Explorer
Senior Rabbit-Hole Explorer
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Broken ethernet wiring in the wall-plug?
in reply to muesli

Senior Rabbit-Hole Explorer
Senior Rabbit-Hole Explorer
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When the ethernet cabling in the second room has an issue (like broken or swapped cables) you might get something lime that.

But you seem to have tracked it down to the power supply, so everything seems OK now 😉

We once had machines boot without issues in one room but with problems in another room. turned out it was the room lighting in one room that was emitting IR frequencies that interferred with the machines... Took us a while...
in reply to Senior Rabbit-Hole Explorer

muesli
muesli
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Ah, no, as mentioned in the original post: same ethernet cable, connected to the same switch & port. Just dragged the Pi into the next room.
in reply to muesli

vampirdaddy
vampirdaddy
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Have you tried a shoot-out regarding connections?
I.e. powering it from the "working" place with long cables (including betwork, monitor and peripheries).
Does it boot completely standalone (only Pi+Monitor, the latter powered with a long mains cable from "working"), pi running from a USB power bank?
If so, power for the monitor from the flaky location mains. Then the pi. Add one connection for each consecutive boot to find the culprit. (My guess: network connection)
in reply to muesli

Shredni Vashtar
Shredni Vashtar
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It's definitely the external network connection to the Pi so:
Faulty RJ45 connector on the Pi
Faulty cable
Faulty connectors on the cable
Faulty port(s) on the switch

Have you:
Booted without network connection?
Booted with WIFI?

Last resort answer:
The room is haunted. :-)
in reply to muesli

Albert ARIBAUD ✎
Albert ARIBAUD ✎
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I'd go for double cause even though it's the least probable in itself: both the socket *and* the power plug are defective. The power plug fails if powered slightly below mains standard voltage, and the socket is oxydized or has a faulty contact somehow.
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