I’ve finally gotten a test Pi for my Home Assistant installation. The main system has been running on a Pi4 4GB for more than 2 years and I was able to snag a 2GB Pi4 to start a ground-up rebuild of my home environment.
However, when I attempt to set up Home Assistant, the 2GB Pi doesn’t want to respond at all. If I hook up a monitor to it without any SD card installed, it will show the generic “No boot media available screen.”
But if there is an SD card, the screen is just black even after 30 minutes. I’ve tried BalenaEtcher, the official Raspberry Pi Imager, and two different SD cards; everything is the same each time. The red power light is solid and the green activity blinks quickly but dimly.
Yes, I did a fresh copy/paste of the image URL shown here when using BalenaEtcher. I also selected the generic 32-bit and 64-bit images using the official Raspberry Pi Imager. I even tried an external SSD drive. Every time had a blank black screen if there were any media available.
What other troubleshooting steps can I take? Is there a “really super scrub format this SD card” utility to make sure there are no conflicting boot-sector instructions?
@erkr There’s no cooling attached, but it never got to a point to be even warm to the touch, always cool to the touch. I usually make sure the device is working before installing it into a case with cooling.
@boheme61 I’ve used an official Canakit 3.5A power supply and a USB-C cable from my laptop to power the Pi during testing.
Are there utilities like MemTest I can use to help diagnose the issue?
If it is defective, is it worth attempting an RMA with the current shortage going on? If so, would I just contact Adafruit about it?
ok, thou i did wonder if you have tried with another, but i guess the answer is No, unless you mean you actually tried to power the PI, from your laptop-usb port
usb 2.0 deliver 0.5A , usb 3.1 09.A , … your backup-power , i have no idea … thats why my initial question was. Have you tried with another power supply that you use on a “working” PI … i don’t know how much a PI require, but if the “official Canakit 3.5A power supply” is recommended, i doubt it’s a good idea to “plug” this into a laptops usb-port.
I had the same issues when I did my install.
Turned out that the pi did not like 3 of my SD cards, even though they worked and tested perfectly. Also make sure to use a formatting tool like Sd format on the SD card and not windows format tool.
If a new SD card still fails, I would try installing raspberry os to see if it runs fine. This will help rule out the pi as the issue.
Using a power adapter lower than 3.5amps on a pi 4 is not recommended by the manufacturer.