New Setup Solid Red & Solid Green LED's

Hello All,

I’m not sure where my mistake may have been made, but I’m working with brand new equipment and seem to have run into an issue. I downloaded the two zip files and wrote the raspbian-piaware-1.14-2 image to an SD card. When I power up the Rasberry Pi unit I get a solid red and a solid green LED. There’s no flashing what so ever, and the green LED looks to be just as bright as the red one. I’ve repeated the process twice with two different SD cards. I should also note that I’ve used two different USB/SD adapters.
The ethernet port isn’t flashing as well.

Any thoughts?

The steady green led indicates the thing doesn’t boot. Causes (in order of likelyhood and gut feeling):

  • using a cheap telephone charger (try a different, more powerfull one, escpecially when USB devices need to be powered)
  • bad contact between SD card and Pi
  • bad SD card / image not correctly written.
  • bad Pi

After ruling out the supply you might try pushing up the SD card gently when powering on. If that fails my next try would be writing a standard Raspbian Weezy image from here and see what happens.

Good luck!
/paul

I also recommend reformatting the SD card before placing the filesystem image on the card (especially if the card is >32GB). The card must be formatted for FAT32, however larger cards come formatted with EXFAT.

Do you have an HDMI display like a computer monitor or HDTV that you could plug into your Pi and take a picture of what it says?

You’ll get the same behavior of solid red and solid green LEDs if you power up the Pi with no SD card in the card slot at all. So I’m leaning toward an SD card problem.

If you have a Model B then it has a fairly limited amount of power for USB. If you have any USB devices plugged in that aren’t essential for booting, try removing them.

If you have a model B+ with the micro SD card then there is a real positive click, like a ballpoint pen, when you click the card in there so please make sure it clicks in there and seats well. On some B+ units it’s possible to pull the card out without pushing in to click it out so make sure it didn’t accidentally get pulled part-way out by clicking it out and back in.

The .img file should be exactly 3,276,800,000 bytes long. If you have a tool to calculate the SHA1 checksum of the file then it should turn out to be 22ba87ad82e83aa44865fd376655694f276a8659. If there is any deviation in the file size or checksum then your download is corrupted and yeah, about for sure it won’t work.

If you use a Mac to copy the img file to the SD card and you use the “dd” terminal command rather than the tool then there are a couple of files you have to delete on the card and then issue an unmount disk command.

If you have another SD card then try that. You might also try formatting the card with the formatter from the SD card association. It can do low level stuff to the card to fix the wear leveling tables that are maintained by the ARM processor on the SD card itself, behind the back of the filesystem. If those get corrupted then the card won’t work right and this can happen fairly easily like if a machine loses power while it’s writing or you pull the card out while it’s being written to.

I think the rate of Raspberry Pi computers turning up dead on arrival is low. Like out of a couple hundred I don’t think we’ve had any that didn’t work. I would put my money on that there’s some kind of SD card problem, but if you go through all the aforementioned stuff and have the same problem with a second SD card then suspicion will probably move to the Pi.

Please let us know what you find out. We are happy to try to help.

I found a MicroSD card from my one of my Android phones. I reformatted (FAT32) it and am currently writing the image to it. Plugged it into the microSD port.
Result: Solid red and flashing erratic green LED. Everything seems to be working

Thanks for the help everyone!