Search This Blog

Sunday 3 January 2016

Raspberry Pi Zero (not) dead on arrival

I purchased a Pi Zero recently but could not get it to work - I assumed that it was DOA.  I tried it with the power, SD, HDMI and USB keyboard inserted, just the power and pretty much every permutation of these and could not get any kind of response - the screen was dead and there was no power or activity light.

I contacted Pimoroni where I'd bought it to return it and received a very quick response from Phil Howard on a Sunday afternoon.  He suggested that there was nothing wrong with the Pi, but that I had the wrong operating system on the SD card.  I've been using the Pi for some time (I've owned a B, A+, 2 and now a Zero) and thought this seemed unlikely, but investigated in depth.

The reasons are long, complicated and boring, but it eventually transpired that my Linux Mint laptop had done something weird with the partitions on the SD card that 5 minutes with gparted fixed.  I was then able to install and using the Raspbian jessie lite image with no problems.

So, I learned a few things:
  1. The Pi Zero doesn't have a power light
  2. The "act" light only starts to flash once the boot sequence begins.  If the Pi can't boot, there is no status indicator of any kind
  3. gparted can sort strange partition problems out without learning any terminal syntax



5 comments:

  1. Thank you so much! You have just saved my Pi Zero! I was sure I bricked it, and that was actually microsd faulty...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. sorry for the late reply - I've had outdoor projects during the summer! This issue caused a bit of a fuss on the Pi forums for a short time while the issue was debated. Glad I could help

      Delete
  2. What exactly did you do in gparted that corrected the issue?

    ReplyDelete
  3. yeah, what was the weird thing with the partitions and how did you solve it?

    ReplyDelete
  4. I can't recall the specifics now, but essentially the problem stemmed from the fact that I'd used the SD card for something else beforehand and hadn't formatted it properly. The Pi couldn't make sense of it, and the status light remained out (which turns out is the "correct" behavior).

    I used gparted on a Linux Mint PC to make 100% certain that the card was properly cleaned before reinstalling the OS

    ReplyDelete