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

Former Member

I seem to be having a problem.

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

 

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.

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  • 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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  • 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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