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Not booting with element14 sd card

hchattaway

Hello

 

I had created an sd card using the latest Raspian image which did not work. I had thought it might have been because of the card. So I ordered the element 14 Raspian 4 gb sd card. Same thing. I have 2 Raspberry Pi B's. When I apply power the red light comes on, and the green lights for a second. Then no activity and no activity shown on the screen. This happens with both computers. I tried it with the bluetooth dongle plugged in and not plugged in.

 

Any ideas? What might be the usual suspects?


Thanks

Harold

Parents

  • Definitely try the above suggestions first, but here are some other things to look at.

     

    A very frequent cause of boot failure is a below specification power supply. Try swapping that out with a known good one. This discussed here: http://elinux.org/RPi_Hardware#Power_Supply_Problems

     

    Once that is eliminated as a cause:

     

    Do you have an Ethernet cable plugged in? If so, you should definitely see more activity on those LEDs than just one flash on the rightmost LED.

     

    Do you have any hardware plugged onto the GPIO pins? If so, remove it until you get your Pi running.

     

    If you have another computer with a serial interface, you can wire it up to pins 6 and 8 of the GPIO. This is explained here: http://elinux.org/RPi_Serial_Connection What you should see is the root console output as the Pi is booting. These messages can help you understand how far into the boot process your Pi actually got, even if there is no monitor output.

  • in reply to guzunty

    Hello Derek,

     

    I tried just using the comp video cable... same problem.

     

    I checked the powersupply using the my meter on the TP1 and TP2 terminals. Meter read a solid 4.94 volts.

     

    I have no hardware on the GPIO pins.

     

    have not been able to try the serial interface.

     

    Alli continue to see is a solid red power light and very brief flash of the green light.

     

    bumming me out here.. I am very excited to get these going! I bought a fair amount of stuff to get into experimentation with this and an Arduino board. Fascinating stuff!

     

    Harold

  • in reply to hchattaway

    Hi Harold,

     

    There's a few more things to try yet .... Highly unlikely both Pi's are defective. (Did you buy both at the same time, btw?)

     

    Check the memory chip in the centre of the board, does it say Hynix? If so then there is a known incompatibility between older builds of Raspbian and the hardware build revision of the Pi boards you have.

     

    More detail here:

     

    http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3534

     

    If this is the case then you need to flash a clean, recently downloaded image of the OS (ie don't guess, go get a new image as of today). Make sure you follow the flash procedure exactly, you cannot just copy the image to the card. It requires a specific utility. I suggest using the Element14 card since we can at least be 100% sure the card is hardware compatible (I have never had an issue with any card I've used, but I read that it does happen). If this fixes the problem for you, I suggest you go complain loudly to Element14, they should not be shipping stale OS images.

     

    Hope that helps.

     

    Finally, BE CAREFUL when connecting an Arduino to an RPi. Arduino is 5v, RPi is 3.3v. Some Arduinos can be run at 3.3v  but make sure before connecting them. If your Arduino is 5v, you can use one of these addons to safely connect them:

     

    https://github.com/Guzunty/Pi/wiki

     

    (Disclosure, I curate this open source site)

  • in reply to guzunty

    hello Derek,

     

    It Worked!   My memory chip did say "Hynix". So I took a look at the dates on the element14 OS image that I just got, and they were dated from last October! So I downloaded the latest image, reimaged the same SD card, and it booted right up. So thanks very much for this help....now for some play time...

     

    I'll bring it up with element14...

     

    Thanks

    Harold

Reply
  • in reply to guzunty

    hello Derek,

     

    It Worked!   My memory chip did say "Hynix". So I took a look at the dates on the element14 OS image that I just got, and they were dated from last October! So I downloaded the latest image, reimaged the same SD card, and it booted right up. So thanks very much for this help....now for some play time...

     

    I'll bring it up with element14...

     

    Thanks

    Harold

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