Raspberry Pi Dead on Arrival

[alberg]

A couple of days ago, I ordered 4 Raspberry Pi units from you guys. They were delivered the next day (sweet!) and 3 of them are working fine, all set up to serve as local cached Khan Academy video servers for the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village (www.asyv.org) in Rwanda.

Unit #4, not so much. When I boot it up, I get no HDMI video and only the red power light comes on and stays on (no flashing green/yellow lights). Methinks “He’s Dead, Jim.” I tried swapping the SD card, cables and did all of the normal troubleshooting stuff. I am using the same power source for the good and bad units. I let the unit sit overnight in case the fuse had blow and needed to reset.

Are there any other troubleshooting steps I should take? If not, what’s the process for RMA-ing the board and getting a minty fresh working one?

Happy Thanksgivukkah
Al

[adafruit_support_mike]

If the same card works in one RasPi but not in another, that sounds like a hardware issue.

One thing to try before doing a replacement: get a magnifier and a strong light and look into the SD card holder. There's a known-but-rare issue where a bit of gunk from the assembly process can get lodged under one of the pins. If that's the case, you can try to dislodge the particle with a sharp needle.

If you don't see anything, send a note to [email protected] with a link to this thread and we'll get you a replacement.

[gruebler]

hello,
I have just bought my first raspberry pi. unfortunately, when I plug everything in, only one red ligtht is on. no green light, no login on putty. but putty is not giving back any error message as it does when the raspberry is unplugged. any constructive suggestions or have i just bought a brick?

[adafruit_support_mike]

If the red LED is on but the green one doesn't flash, it means your RasPi can't read the SD card. Try another card, or formatting the one you have with the SD Association's official tool: https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/ then re-writing the OS to the card.

[gruebler]

Thank you for your answer. Since I have bought the onion pi pack with wheezy on the SD card, I have believed that the SD card by adafruit would work out of the box...

[adafruit_support_mike]

The vast majority of cards do work out of the box, but there's always a chance of a glitch. Fortunately reformatting the card and writing a new copy of the OS doesn't cost anything.

If the card you received still doesn't boot and another card does, we'll replace the one that came with the kit.