This is my first Pi, and while I have a background in microprocessor technology, I find myself stumbling through this setup. I have a Pi 3B with a 3.5" touchscreen plugged in. I have a USB mouse and keyboard installed and headphones plugged in as well. I am using a SanDisk 16GB SD card that I loaded with the 2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.img file. I have not connected an HDMI display, as I was hoping that it would work with the touchscreen or be accessible from the Win7 desktop I have it connected to for power(once the Pi booted up).
I read that it takes a long time for the first boot, but how long? I'm over an hour now, and I still occasionally have the green led flash on and the red one off for a second. My touch screen is lit up, but nothing is displayed on it. I have an explorer window up, but no sign of the Pi being recognized by my desktop.
Is it taking longer because of the size of the SD card, and it has to reformat it?
Are there any error codes for the flashes that I should be aware of? (there doesn't seem to be any pattern at the moment, the green occasionally flashes on, and on an even longer period the red one occasionally flashes off).
I'm supposed to shut this down "cleanly", but how do I do that if it never comes up correctly?
Obviously I will not get an answer before I have to power this down for the night, but when I do (assuming it never comes out of it's current state of setup) will it damage the Pi in any way, or just possibly the SD card?
Should I take the touchscreen off, hook up an HDMI monitor and try again? Or should I blank the SD card, reformat it, and reload the image file in case it was corrupted from this first attempt?
Should I start with NOOBS? I didn't because after reading, I felt that I would just end up with raspbian-jessie anyway, so why hassle with the "middleman". I had no issue using Win32DiskImager to load the image file onto the SD card, but maybe I should have started with NOOBS anyway.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I stumble through learning all of this.
Thanks :-)
*****Update*****
After nearly 2 hours of sporadic flashing, but absolutely nothing else, I pulled the USB power cord. While powered down I removed the touchscreen and plugged in an HDMI monitor. On power up, it booted and went immediately to a desktop. It must have finished its initial setup the first time.
Anyway, the Pi works and now I need to learn what I can do with it. Not sure about the touch screen, but will try again after I learn more about the Pi.
Just thought I'd update for anyone who might have a similar issue.
