Pi boot ony with hdmi attached

[boki]

argh.... I need to make a mental note to check this forum sooner! When I have a headless RPi disappear from the LAN (wired), I have a habit (learned from experience) of pulling the SD card, running fsck on all partitions on another machine, then testing for one successful boot by plugging in an HDMI cable and keyboard to watch the output. Then I put the RPi back in it's original location, headless. I spent more time than I would like to admit repeating this process several times tonight, before wondering if maybe the issue wasn't caused by a corrupted filesystem from the power outage my apt had a few days ago.
Adding $this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'hdmi_force_hotplug=1') to /boot/config.txt "solved" the problem for me, too. For reference, this particular device is a Raspberry Pi Model B Rev 2.

[Synch]

I have the same problem with my RPi 0W. When I boot it headless as I normally do, it doesn't work. When I try again with HDMI connected, it boots fine.

Adding hdmi_force_hotplug=1 to /boot/config.txt as boki suggested fixes the problem for me.

[pwlb]

I can confirm the bug with Rpi3 and current packages