Check Your Peripheral Cords
One of your peripheral cords may not be fully seated in its port. Being “fully seated” means the
connector on the cable is all the way plugged into its port. A cord that’s not fully seated can cause a
peripheral to work some of the time or not at all. To check your peripheral cords, follow these steps:
- Unplug the power source to your Raspberry Pi.
- Turn off your monitor or TV.
- For each cable connector hooked to your Raspberry Pi, unplug it and then plug it back in to the
connector. Take time to make sure the connector is fully seated into the port. - For each cable connector hooked to another device from your Raspberry Pi, unplug it and then
plug it back into the device. Take time to make sure the connector is fully seated in the port. - Turn on your monitor or TV.
- Plug the power source back into your Raspberry Pi.
Check Your SD Card
If you Pi doesn’t boot, you might not have used a SD card that works. To ensure that you have a
usable SD card, go to elinux.org/RPi_SD_cards and double-check that a Raspberry Pi can use the SD
card you have.
Did You Know: Using LED Lights for Troubleshooting
The Raspberry Pi has no BIOS in it. Thus, it can only boot off the SD card when it
receives power. There are LED lights on the Raspberry Pi that may help you
troubleshoot your booting problem. If you see the red LED light on, but the green LED
light is not lit and nothing is showing on the display, then you have either a bad SD
card or a bad operating system image on the card. For more LED troubleshooting tips,
see elinux.org/R-Pi_Troubleshooting#Normal_LED_status.Check Your Operating System Image
If you are using a verified SD card but the Raspberry Pi is still not booting, you may have a bad
operating system image on the SD card. The image may have been damaged during the download, or
it could have been damaged when you moved it to the SD card. You can verify the image by using the
tips at elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup.
Check Your Peripherals
If you’ve checked everything listed so far, make sure all your peripherals are verified to work with
the Raspberry Pi. You can find this information at elinux.org/RPi_VerifiedPeripherals.
Summary
In this hour, you learned what the Raspberry Pi is and why it exists, how to purchase one, and the
peripherals you need to get it up and running. You read about the available operating systems for the
Raspberry Pi and how to obtain a copy of Raspbian. You also learned how to get your Raspberry Pi
up and running so you can proceed with learning Python programming. The hour concludes with some
troubleshooting tips to consult if you have problems getting your Pi up and running.