Pi Zero W - no signs of life

Moderators: adafruit_support_bill, adafruit

Forum rules
Talk about Adafruit Raspberry Pi® accessories! Please do not ask for Linux support, this is for Adafruit products only! For Raspberry Pi help please visit: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/
Locked
User avatar
gardyloo
 
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat Jun 04, 2016 7:10 pm

Pi Zero W - no signs of life

Post by gardyloo »

Invoice # 2671083, ordered Oct 3 2021 - using the accessories in this order I have tried getting the Zero W to boot. However there's nothing from this device - no LED lights (though the attached USB Mini Hub with power switch has a blue LED that illuminates), and nor anything on my HDMI-connected display. Using the same hardware (keyboard/mouse/display/power supply) I can boot an older Pi-2B+ just fine. Oh - have tried this with two different uSD cards, each programmed with latest Raspbian.

Any way to get an RMA/exchange on this device?

Disappointedly yours,
Frank

User avatar
Franklin97355
 
Posts: 23911
Joined: Mon Apr 21, 2008 2:33 pm

Re: Pi Zero W - no signs of life

Post by Franklin97355 »

You have version 5.10? Can you try downloading the Raspbian lite version?

User avatar
gardyloo
 
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat Jun 04, 2016 7:10 pm

Re: Pi Zero W - no signs of life

Post by gardyloo »

Yes, it's 5.10.
Sure, I'll try the 'lite' version (once I find it).
Is there no power indicator LED on this, independent of the OS at bootup? I'm not seeing any illumination other than from the USB mini hub.
Off to look for 'lite' version...

User avatar
gardyloo
 
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat Jun 04, 2016 7:10 pm

Re: Pi Zero W - no signs of life

Post by gardyloo »

Dang - it was my error. When I copied the Raspbian OS image to the SD card, I used the command:
dd bs=4M if={image file name here} of=/dev/sde1
The fault was that last '1' in the output. The image is set up to be copied to the root of the uSD card, in my case /dev/sde {no '1'}. The miscopied image looks kinda right - fdisk shows a semi-sensible partition table, but fsync complains about the number of partitions. Close enough that it seemed imperfect but likely ok. Well, it wasn't.

Contributing: there _is_ a power LED, but it doesn't come on without a functioning OS. Nor is there any video signal. Once the correct image copying command is given, it all seems to be working - hurrah!

Sorry for the noise!

User avatar
danhalbert
 
Posts: 4654
Joined: Tue Aug 08, 2017 12:37 pm

Re: Pi Zero W - no signs of life

Post by danhalbert »

This may be helpful in the future, since, as you've found, without a good SD card load, the Pi Zero [W] appears dead:
https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing- ... zero-dead2

Locked
Forum rules
Talk about Adafruit Raspberry Pi® accessories! Please do not ask for Linux support, this is for Adafruit products only! For Raspberry Pi help please visit: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/

Return to “Adafruit Raspberry Pi® accessories”