Raspberry Pi Forums

My old Pi3 would never boot so Adafruit is sending me a new one.
I want to make sure I am doing everything correctly before I power up the new one. Here goes:

1. I have read the sticky note on boot up problems.
2. You can refer to my previous posts on this problem. See JMikeH

3. Here is how I am doing the SD card:
3A. Bought a new SanDisk 16 GB card
3B. I did a full format with the SD Formater program on my MacBook with OSx.
There is only two choices available under the options: Yes to enable "Logical Address Adjustment" or No. I did No.
3C. I named the SD card "4NOOBS"
3D. I unzipped the NOOBS file and transferred only the files - not the NOOBS directory. I now have 14 files and 3 directories on the card. The new SD card shows 15.92 GB total space after copying NOOBS.
3E. I checked this against the original NOOBS 8GB SD card I got from Adafruit. All the files are the same and byte count for the files and the directories is the same on both SD cards.

3.***********Is this the correct method???????************* I think so.

4. What should I connect to the Pi3 for initial power up??????????
4A. Only the NOOBS SD card and power to see what lights flash??????
or
4B. Everything: SD card, monitor, keyboard, mouse???? Is internet connection required?????
or
4C. Some other configuration??????

All comments are appreciated.
Mike

Any RPi needs only SD card and power to boot. A connected display is useful to confirm it is booting properly.

JMikeH wrote:.........
3D. I unzipped the NOOBS file and transferred only the files - not the NOOBS directory. I now have 14 files and 3 directories on the card. The new SD card shows 15.92 GB total space after copying NOOBS ........

You must have downloaded NOOBS LITE which includes no OS. To use NOOBS LITE you need to have an Internet connection in order to get any OS(s).
If you used regular full NOOBS then that includes Raspbian and should occupy about 1GB of disk space on the SD. So your disk free space should be more like 14.x GB. Raspbian will be located in the OS folder before installation. If the OS/raspbian folder and files are not there then you did something wrong. This does not need internet connection unless you also want to install other OS(s) at the same time.

Just to be clear. NOOBS lite will boot without an internet connection. (But can't install any OS without an internet connection.)

JMikeH wrote:3B. I did a full format with the SD Formater program on my MacBook with OSx.

Make sure the SD card is formatted with fat32 file system, not exfat.

Regards
Aydan

Aydan wrote:

JMikeH wrote:3B. I did a full format with the SD Formater program on my MacBook with OSx.

Make sure the SD card is formatted with fat32 file system, not exfat.

Regards
Aydan

Yep. On Mac the best way to do that is Disk utility.