Raspberry Pi 2 Not booting

Question

When I power on the Pi, the HDMI attached monitor shows a screen with shades of various colors and I have no clue where to go from there. The keyboard is attached to one USB port and the a Wi Pi to another. Of course the power cable is connected and the SD card (with the OS) is installed. Ive gone through the Start Up video but the things that are suppose to be happening are not. This is my first experience with the Raspberry Pi. But I have years of experience using Microsoft and OS X. Can someone kindly help this Pi newbie get started?

Gough Lui · Accepted Answer

Seeing as the files in your card's root directory are dated from 2014, it seems that your card may have been a NOOBs card with an image from prior to the launch of the Raspberry Pi 2 and thus cannot be booted on the new Raspberry Pi 2. You should download a new NOOBs image from the Raspberry Pi foundation and write that to the card following the instructions here . There's a good chance that this will make it work.

royleith · Answer

Hi Mel,

I've just spent the best part of a day on my Raspi 2 and so I may be able to save you some future grief.

First, your immediate problem is that the Raspi 2 requires the very latest Raspbian image. I think you are using an earlier image. Get the latest one from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ The one I am using is the 2015-01-31 version of Raspbian. That may be all you need to do.

However, I have been having problems after an OS upgrade that you may wish to avoid. From your photos I think you are using a powered hub to connect your mouse, keyboard and wifi dongle. Please continue to do that for the time being. I have found that using the four USB ports directly for mouse/keyboard wireless dongles and wifi dongles can cause problems in booting to the desktop with the Raspberry 2.

Also, once you have burnt the up-to-date image on to your card, access the boot partition in Windows or Mac and open config.txt in a text editor. Change the lines,

# uncomment to increase signal to HDMI, if you have interference, blanking, or

# no display

#config_hdmi_boost=4

to,

# uncomment to increase signal to HDMI, if you have interference, blanking, or

# no display

config_hdmi_boost=4

Sometimes the Raspberry Pi may boot to a blank screen because there is not enough HDMI signal to drive the monitor. Most of my Raspberry Pis are happier booting to the desktop with this setting, although it may not be necessary at all with your system or you may only need a boost of 2. Once you are booting up and closing down without problems then you can restore this line and see if it is OK for you. If you boot to a blank screen, the only way out is to turn the power off and this may corrupt some of the files. You may want to jump ahead, at this point, and read the bit about backing up the partitions.

All of my Raspberry Pis work well at 1000MHz. When you first boot up, a program called raspi-config will run automatically. I suggest you use option 7 for Overclock and choose the option,

Pi2 1000MHz ARM, 500MHz core, 500MHz SDRAM, 2 overvolt│

DON'T USE ANY OF THE OTHER OPTIONS except for the 700Mhz or 800Mhz lines.

Finally, if you have partition backup software on your Windows PC, back up the two partitions on the SDHC card once you have set up the desktop with the programs and configuration that you want. I use Linux with partimage for partition 1 and fsarchiver for partition 2. That way, if any experiments go wrong, you can repartition the card and restore the partition contents. This, of course, preserves all your system configuration, data files and installed programs from the moment you made the backup. The reason I suggest this is that if you boot to a blank screen or the mouse and keyboard stop working then the only answer is to turn the power off. You may well corrupt the files on either of the partitions, but especially the FAT16 boot partition.

Once you have done this, it is safe to try plugging the mouse, keyboard and wifi dongle straight into the Raspberry Pi and putting the hub to one side until you need it for an external hard drive or a DVD burner.

johnbeetem · Answer

I recommend checking the RasPi Troubleshooting Wiki: http://elinux.org/R-Pi_Troubleshooting#Coloured_splash_screen According to the Wiki, the screen you're seeing means that the GPU is running correctly, but the Linux kernel isn't. You may have the wrong version, or there's a problem with your SD card. Adding the boot delay might fix it, so try that first.