If like me, you have just set up your very own retro games console using the brilliant RetroPie and you have enabled your own boot splash screen / boot sequence video, then you may also find the text displayed when a Raspberry Pi boots can detract from the nostalgic experience. Read on to find out how to hide boot text on your Raspberry Pi.

If you have read my earlier post – Raspberry PiStation – A Retro Games Console – then you will have almost certainly seen my custom boot sequence video:

However, when you power on your Pi you will still get the boat-load of text as it boots (often called “verbose boot”), which can detract from the games console experience. However, did you know you can hide boot text on the Raspberry Pi?

Note – Please take care when doing this as any errors can result in complete boot failure. Making an image of your SD card before doing this is highly recommended!

Hide boot text

Firstly, you are going to need to SSH into your Pi. So ahead do just that. Once you are in, this is what you need to do:

sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt

This will open the “cmdline.txt” file in Nano as the “root” user. Be careful editing this, as any issues can cause a boot failure. All the text should be on one line and this is the default:

dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait

We are going to make a few changes here to hide boot text, which are

Change console from “tty1” to “tty3”

Add “loglevel=3”

Add “quiet”

Add “logo.nologo”

When done, it should look like this:

dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty3 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait loglevel=3 quiet logo.nologo

Now press Ctrl+X, then Y to save then reboot.

sudo reboot

You should now have a black screen whilst your Pi boots, and if you have set up a custom splash screen or boot video, this will be the first thing you see.

If you want to return to verbose boot mode, just undo the bits you added back to default.

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