Should we see anything if we plug our pi in without a SD card?

I seem to be having a problem.

I do have a card, and Ive instaed the Debian for ARM on it on my daughters laptop.

However I now just get a red power light, no green light. I did have pronlems as the SD card is a MICRO one with a SD converter. My apple see's the card, but my PC doesnt (hence using daughters), I have a feeling its the SD converter, but I would love to see something pi like on the TV.

Also if i use my old analogue TV, around what channel will I see the startion appear on the TV if i autotune?

Thanks

Chris.

GreenYamo over 13 years ago

Hello Chris,

Micro SD cards seem to cause a lot of problems - make sure yours isn't on the problem list at the Raspi Wiki http://elinux.org/RPi_VerifiedPeripherals#SD_cards

Also check out the troubleshooting part of the Wiki http://elinux.org/R-Pi_Troubleshooting#Red_power_LED_does_not_light.2C_nothing_on_display

As far as I know, the Pi will not boot without an SD card in place.

The fact that the PC doesn't see the card doesn't give me great hope the Pi will, it seems very sensitive to what sort of card is used.

As the Video is either RCA or HDMI you don't need to tune your TV at all, it should either automatically switch to the input, or you may need to manually select, look for a 'source' or 'input' button on your remote, select either HDMI or something like Aux1, Aux2 etc for the RCA.
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Former Member over 13 years ago in reply to GreenYamo

Rats my card is on the list - no wonder it was cheap

Of course video output is not an RF - silly me.
Thanks

Sorted.
New card on order. Sigh.
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GreenYamo over 13 years ago in reply to Former Member

Good luck ! Out of interest what card do you go for in the end ?

It seem to be a bit of a minefield at the moment, I have Sandisk which seem OK but not great, a friend bought his Sandisk card round with RaspBMC on it and it was noticeable faster than my one, which to all intents an purposes was identical !

Steve
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Former Member over 13 years ago in reply to GreenYamo

From eBay I ordered an 8 gig Samsung sd card, not a hybrid micro one. £6.99 delivered and came next day. Not the cheapest, but works like a dream.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/120908224091?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1497.l2649

Sent from my iPad (3rd gen)
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GreenYamo over 13 years ago in reply to Former Member

Good news :-) I've just bought one from the working list (an integral class 10) and it seems to be working so far....hope that isn't tweaking the nose of fate too much.

Steve
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Former Member over 13 years ago

Chris,
As quick answer to the original question is No, you shouldn't see anything on the screen without an SD card. The Pi doesn't have any internal storage or flash memory, so nothing like a PC's BIOS is present with the Pi. This means that everything the Pi needs to boot, including the turning on of the GPU, ports, memory, etc are all contained on the SD card.
I've noted on the couple of images I've loaded on my cards, that each has a small partition, less than 100MB that has these files, including the confit.txt file that you can use to configure the system beyond the defaults. I needed to use this file to enable the right HDMI settings and to allow sound to be sent via the HDMI cable.
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