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Is my Raspberry Pi finished out of the start gate?

e14 Contributor

I took delivery this past week.  Waited until I could download an OS and install it onto a 32 Gig SD card before I begin playing with it.  Once I did that, I plugged it in and......nothing.  Tried the composit vidio....nothing.  Tried the HDMI port.....nothing.  I was expecting at least some kind of a BIOS screen even if it didn't see an OS.  So.....is it DOA?

  • There's no BIOS on the RasPi board.  The BIOS equivalent is in the first partition of the SD Card so if there's a problem with the SD card or the image didn't get transferred properly you'll get nothing.

     

    I suggest starting with the RasPi Troubleshooting Wiki and see if you have any of the most common problems, such as an iffy power supply or an iffy Micro USB cable.

  • Some things you can check.

     

    If you plug the sd card in a windows pc, you should at least see the boot partition with the boot files in it. It's approx 70MB in size.

    The Pi does nothing when the sd card is not plugged in, as the boot partition contains the firmware which can be compared to a pc bios.

    The green ok led on the Pi is like the hdd led of a pc. It should start flashing when the os is read from the sd card.

    For a stable Pi operation, you need a TP1 - TP2 voltage of at least 4.85V. The testpoints are clearly marked on the board.

    The Elinux site might be the place for more information to fix your issue.

    Some people also reported bad contacts on the sd card socket. A visual inspection of those contacts doesn't hurt.

  • My SD is a 32 gig.  Is there a maximum size recognized?

     

    I have looked at the SD card contents after loading the ISO and it looks good.

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    I followed your link to troubleshooting and that answered my question about my SD card.  The one I have has worked in the RPi. 

     

    I used Win32DiskImager to transfer the OS disk image to the SD card and got a write successful.

     

    I tried both the archlinuxarm-13-06-2012 and the 2012-09-18-wheezy-raspbian images to see if one or the other would work.

  • in reply to e14 Contributor

    After trying the two OSs, I note no green led showing drive access.  The power supply was purchased specifically for the RPi and is a 5 volt at 1 amp, pleanty of power to supply the unit.  I haven't measured the voltage at the test points yet but suspect no issue with this.  It will be verified. 

  • in reply to e14 Contributor

    I'd recommend you measure the voltage on the test points, also try to see if the board works with a smaller (4-8G SD card).

     

    What brand/model/class is your 32GB card ?

  • in reply to e14 Contributor

    Peter Beauregard wrote:

     

    After trying the two OSs, I note no green led showing drive access.  The power supply was purchased specifically for the RPi and is a 5 volt at 1 amp, pleanty of power to supply the unit.  I haven't measured the voltage at the test points yet but suspect no issue with this.  It will be verified. 

    Quite a few people have had trouble with a Micro USB cable.  Some have very thin conductors so the voltage drop across them can be high enough to make RasPi sad.  There's also a voltage drop across polyfuse F3, but this is usually small unless F3 is bad.  So even though your power supply is fine, you could still get a low voltage at TP1-TP2.  If you have a volt/multimeter handy it's easy to check.

     

    If you're not getting any green LED flickering then most likely (1) the voltage drop is too large, (2) the RasPi itself is bad, e.g., a bad polyfuse F3 or a bent pin in the SD socket, or (3) something is wrong with the SD card image even though it looks fine to Windows.  I have heard of people having trouble writing a RasPi SD card from a PC's built-in SD card reader but it works OK with an external SD card reader.

     

    You might see if there are any RasPi users or groups near you so you can try booting with a known good SD card.

  • One thing that appears to be common from the troubleshooting section of the other board is people attempting to write the .zip rather than the actual .img file (though that is with dd, I don't think win32diskimager will let you choose a .zip file).  They've also suggested do a quick format of the card to make sure that you're actually written anything to the card.

     

    I've also seen talk from a couple people that the wheezy image doesn't work with their pi until they update the the firmware files off the github.  To do this you'd delete everything off the 70MB partition except the config.txt and save the contents from here

     

    https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/tree/master/boot

     

    to the partition.

     

    John's suggest about the TP1-TP2 test voltages also is a common test point. 

     

    If none of these works you might want to posting over in the RPF's troubleshooting section.  They have a lot more people over so the odds are higher someone has had the problem you're describing and they're pretty nice in the troubleshooting section.