Still unable to Boot my RPi help please

This may seem like a stupid question, forgive me for that, but sometimes it's the simplest things that nobody bothers to ask..

The arch and raspbian downloads are zipped. Did you unzip them before writing them to your sd card ?

An easy way to tell is if you put the sd card back into your pc and see if you get a small drive, probably only 100Mb or so, with files like kernel.img, loader.bin, bootcode.bin & start.elf. If you see those then the image on the card should be ok.

With up to date images like the ones you're using, sd-card compatibility is much improved and being on the good/bad lists, or not, is less likely to be an issue.

Given the target audience of the Pi which is intentionally non-technical, it occurs to me that it would be very useful if the Foundation or the community produced a little program for Windows, Mac and something that runs on all Linux flavours, which just looks at the SD card device after it has been written, ejected, and reinserted and checks that it has been written appropriately for booting as a Pi card.

It would catch the problem that your post suggests, and could be made to catch incomplete writes / premature ejects, and various other ills.  I have little doubt that writing the image is a mystery to many people in what it does (ie. creates two or more partitions), and so inevitably is being messed up by a few.  This would help.

Perhaps more thorough documentation on this initial step of the Pi startup process would help too, but not always.  Unfortunately part of the target audience would probably go totally blank when faced with a highly detailed, point-by-point explanation of image writing from first principles, instead of learning from it.  The post-check utility I suggest would plug that gap.

Morgaine.

Given the target audience of the Pi which is intentionally non-technical,

As a 'techie' I often find it hard to help non-technical newcomers. Not because I don't want to, but because I always have some inherent assumption that the most basic of things can be taken for granted and don't need to be asked. Often being greeted by that blank faced look.

Given the target audience and the various issues, limitations, incompatibilities and whatnot that we already know about I can see a lot of frustration from both people in need of help and those trying to offer help.  On my part I know that when that frustration builds all I want to do is elbow them out the way and fix it for them, but as you say nobody learns anything that way..

+1

So true.  Coming from the engineering education side, "I can fix this for you, but you would learn nothing" is a really big source of concern.  No matter how strong the desire, how to help people learn is not even close to being a science yet.  Not remotely so, for all the papers published on the topic.

+1

So true.  Coming from the engineering education side, "I can fix this for you, but you would learn nothing" is a really big source of concern.  No matter how strong the desire, how to help people learn is not even close to being a science yet.  Not remotely so, for all the papers published on the topic.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

No matter how strong the desire, how to help people learn is not even close to being a science yet.  Not remotely so, for all the papers published on the topic.

As a former academic, here is my experience:

1:  They have to want to learn.  A spark has to be there.

2:  Sparks are easily extinguished.  Successful education is about helping sparks turn into passionate fire.

EDIT:

3:  The best engineers are like Kipling's Elephant Child.  They are full of Insatiable Curiosity, which means they ask ever so many questions.  So they get spanked for asking so many questions, but still they're filled with Insatiable Curiosity.  You can't spell Insatiable Curiosity without IC.

John Beetem wrote:

 

2:  Sparks are easily extinguished.

That is so sad.