Boot hangs at Raspberry logo / "ESC (setup) F1 (shell) ENTER (boot)" screen

[rwmjones]

I'm attempting to follow the instructions from here on a RPi 4B 8GB using RPi4-UEFI version 1.20 booting from a USB drive. However it hangs at the Raspberry logo screen. Although the keyboard appears to be alive (Capslock turns on the light) no key seems to do anything. Also the mouse does nothing.

I tried the debug build, but it looks exactly the same. I could not work out how to get a debug log - do I need to attach a serial port for that? Is there a way to disable to logo and show the boot messages on screen instead?

[rwmjones]

Finally I found out what was causing this: it's because I didn't have anything in the SD card slot, ie #37 I had to use a blank SD card (without Raspbian) in the slot to make it work even though I'm not trying to boot from SD.

Also for the record I had a number of other problems which are worth checking if others have boot problems:

• I'm using some USB C drives for installation. They come with USB C - USB 3.0 converters but incredibly these converters are not symmetrical! You have to line up the arrow on the USB C connector with the arrow on the converter, otherwise they don't work.
• I thought for a while (probably related to the previous point) that the Pi couldn't provide sufficient power to the USB ports, so I used a USB 3 powered hub, but that seemed to cause more problems than it solved.
• The initial boot screen, before entering UEFI, is very corrupted and quite hard to read. I guess this is some bug in the Pi 2020-09-03 firmware.
• Check the red and green lights on the Pi - I didn't realise for quite a long time that absence of a green light is meaningful.