Can’t boot brand new pi 3 and no power to USB or Ethernet

Question

Hi,

I received my pi 3 in the post recently, and have just gone to turn it on for the first time. I’m getting the red power LED light but no green or flashing (so this points to an SD issue I assume?), I’m getting no power to the USB (keyboard and mouse) and no power to the Ethernet either. I get no output via HDMI. Not sure how to solve as I don’t even have an OS on it yet so can’t troubleshoot and I’m brand new to raspberry pi it does seem to be pointing to an SD issue but the SD came pre-installed with NOOBS and Raspbian from element14. Anyone able to help? Let me know if I need to provide any more info.

rew · Answer

Well.... A standard PC will have a ROM with code that shows a "bios boot screen".

The raspberry pi was designed with the goal that it would be cheap. So the ROM is left out. Similarly, PCs need hardware to support decades old methods to tell the video card what to do, just because the boot rom uses that mode. Also expensive, also left out.

So.... The raspberry starts out completely blacked out. No power to anything but the CPU. And the CPU knows nothing about how to enable video until it loads something off the SD card...

So this all points towards that you don't have the proper boot files on your SD card. I would recommend just looking for a guide on how to install NOOBS or Raspbian yourself and follow that. You do need a MicroSD card reader/writer on your PC for that though....

beacon_dave · Answer

Perhaps take a look at these troubleshooting guides:

https://elinux.org/R-Pi_Troubleshooting

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=437084#p437084

Power supply and SD cards however appear to be the root cause of a lot of problems with the R-Pi.

rew · Answer

gdstew wrote:

I haven't needed to do anything "special" to get video working on my Pis ..

Well... the only thing special is that you need to have the monitor connected (and possibly powered up) when you boot up the pi.

During boot the pi will then ask the monitor for its preferred configuration and use that.

Some monitors do not conform to the specifications and have to be powered up for this querying to work. It should work when the monitor is off or on "standby" but occasionally you might find one that has this problem. So... if you're having problems, just connect the monitor, power it up and THEN power up the pi.

gdstew · Answer

All LCD monitors (and some CRTs) have the setup information they need to work properly on them and this can be read by the OS. I don't believe

this was done on early versions of Raspberry Pi OSs but I'm fairly certain it is now. I haven't needed to do anything "special" to get video working

on my Pis for several years now and I use several LCD monitors from different manufacturers with different resolutions (1280 x 1024, 1680 x 1050,

and 1920 x 1080). YMMV.