Raspberry pi won't boot. Plz help

Hurkgt18

@mitu hey my email is hurkgt18@yahoo.com. would you be able to shoot me an email so we could communicate that way

mitu

@hurkgt18 No, but you can use the forum - after all, that's what it's for.

herb_fargus

@hurkgt18 wouldn't that be useful if everyone just personally emailed each other for support? The forum would be so clean! We wouldnt have to worry about finding the answers to the same questions other people might have, gone would be the repeated requests for answers that are already in the documentation, you might be on to something!

Hurkgt18

UPDATE: I plugged my pi into my computer and my pc recognized it as a drive, so this means the Pi is not dead. I just received the Canakit Pi power supply, so my power supply is not the issue. I have to imagine it has to do with either the retropie image or the sd card itself. I swear I followed all instructions to the letter when writing the image to the pi but still the pi is not booting. I feel like i am taking crazy pills

Lurker

I've been where you are in projects and nothing makes sense. It should work but it doesn't and you feel like everything you might try will just make it worse and you might as well burn the house down now, but you can't remember where the matches are. So maybe you should just burrow under a pile of rubble and wait to die... "oh the sd card is upside down...heh funny that"

My wife calls it bubbling.

You are not far into it so best advice...
Take a few deep breadths to clear your mind.
Take it from step 1 and even though you downloaded the image and everything, move the old image somewhere else.
Download a new image .
Write it to your micro sd card.
Plug in a monitor and keyboard.
Plug in the micro sd card (make sure it is in the right direction, seriously the above rant caught me once)
Check everything is seated.
Plug in power.

If it works you can take it from there. If not the pie you have may be damaged as you mentioned it arrived rather rough.
...that or resume looking for matches until someone else can talk you down.

To help me, I made my wife a sign to hold up that says

"LISTEN to your Wife!
She is right more often than you."

Clyde

@hurkgt18 The SD card should be easier to replace than the Pi, can you get your hands on another card? A small one of 8 GB should suffice for testing.

Did you check that your download of the image has the same md5sum checksum that's listed under the download button at https://retropie.org.uk/download/? If you don't know how to do that, a quick web search should give you loads of how-tos for your operating system. You should check this first before wildly swapping any hardware. And no, multiple downloads don't guarantee that one of them is faultless.

edit: Mind that you'll have to match the .gz archive with the checksum, not the .img contained in it.

@lurker said in Raspberry pi won't boot. Plz help:

To help me, I made my wife a sign to hold up that says

"LISTEN to your Wife!
She is right more often than you."

You made my day. :D

Hurkgt18

So I took all my stuff to a local store that deals with tech and raspberry pi. Didn't know this store existed lol. We tested my SD card on their display Pi and it started to boot. It was a faulty Pi after all. New one arrives tomorrow. Thanks for the help everyone. Glad I wasn't going nuts.

herb_fargus

@hurkgt18 faulty hardware is unusual but I guess if they are put through the post in naught but a paper envelope that might up the odds. Glad you got it sorted.

rbaker

@hurkgt18 said in Raspberry pi won't boot. Plz help:

We tested my SD card on their display Pi

But did you test your Pi "in" their setup?

Hurkgt18

@rbaker Yes. They used my Pi with their set up and their set up no longer worked.