Pi 3 will not boot with RED LED on

I received a Raspberry Pi 3 kit from Element14 and successfully installed and ran Raspbian from my NOOBS SD card then shutdown the OS from the GUI. Unfortunately, now when I power on the Pi it won’t boot with just the Red LED on, I understand this probably means it can’t read from the SD.

I was going to rebuild thee NOOBS SD so downloaded the files and tried to reformat the SD using the “SD Card Formatter” tool on Windows. The card will not format with the error “Formatting failed” after 97%, the card only has 121Mb capacity as well !! Is there anything else I can Try or is the SD kaput

Graham

e14phil over 7 years ago

Hi Graham

That sounds like you have tried the best steps so far, I would consider trying to format it again and possibly use another program or computer to test it as per the one in shabaz's guide here

Raspberry Pi Setup Guide

Or the official guide here:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/noobs.md
Cancel
Vote Up +1 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
grahamp over 7 years ago in reply to e14phil

Thanks Phil, I will have a looks interesting, I will have a go.

Graham
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
grahamp over 7 years ago in reply to grahamp

* Thanks Phil, looks interesting, I will have a go.
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
e14phil over 7 years ago

Great!
90% of boot problems on the Pi are just bad formatting on SD Cards, Its common to corrupt a card if the Pi is unplugged when it is being written to.
Cancel
Vote Up +1 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
grahamp over 7 years ago in reply to e14phil

That's what I was trying, but unfortunately the SD Format tool fails
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
grahamp over 7 years ago

I did read that the Pi needs time to finish writing to the SD ( unfortunatly afterwards ) particularly after the install, so I could have unplugged it to soon after clicking on shutdown DOOH.

Graham
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
rew over 7 years ago in reply to grahamp

Graham, it is not only that, but also that the SD card needs to finish writing to flash. The Linux operating system was developed when rotating disks were still the norm. So Linux is robust against turning off the power while not all buffers have been written to disk yet. It is called "journalling file system" that sort of stuff.

When you turn off the power while the SD card is still writing stuff to its flash, you might get a bad flash (i.e. unreliable data when reading back), and/or a corruption of the internal structures....
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
COMPACT over 7 years ago

Is your RPi called Roxanne by any chance?
Cancel
Vote Up +2 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
e14phil over 7 years ago in reply to COMPACT
Cancel
Vote Up +1 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel