Raspberry Pi Forums

Yesterday, when I came back from work, my Pi was dead. Only the red light is on. If I try to restart it, the green light will flicker for only a short while, and there is no reaction on the other two lights.

I have experienced that an SD card has become corrupted before. But I tried several of them that I know would work, including a new one that I just flashed. So that is not the reason. And I haven't overclocked the Pi.

The Pi has been running stable since I bought it. It is the original model B with 256 MB RAM from May 2012.

I recently had a possible hacker attack. Everything in my home/pi folder was erased, including the Samba share on my NAS with 600 GB of music files. After that I moved the server to another computer and kept only the music player, while I also changed passwords. But could a hacker possibly be able to destroy the hardware? Or did it happen because the Pi was about to die?

is the SD card bent ?

No, it is not bent, and not the connectors either. And it wouldn't bend itself when it was inserted. I tried several SD cards, old and new.

Ok start from a new fresh SD card , and new fresh raspbian download
then go though the trouble shooting section if it does not work
also check out what voltage you are getting on the test points
look at the contact in the sdcard socket - apply the peg fix test

I'd try another power supply.I had a similar thing many moons ago where I thought a Pi had died. It turned out the power supply had decided it wasn't going to provide 5 volts anymore and supplied a much lesser voltage, which was enough to push it over the edge. A new power supply and away it went.

Entirely new SD card freshly imaged and a fresh known working power supply before you pronounce it dead....

Its very unlikely a hacker could hardware damage a Pi.

I have tried another power supply that works on the neighbour Banana Pi, a new SD card, old SD cards, examined if the SD card connection has been damaged, the network connection. The Pi is dead. I am going to buy another one now.

Dont throw the PI away, you may find after you buy a new one, that it has the same symptoms as this one, and in the end you discover its your microSD cable, or your card after all. Do you know the boot problem sticky?
Its very unlikely that any "hacker " has caused permanent damage to your PI.