Pi won't boot

[Sailing_Nut]

Hi all,

I have some odd behavior that I cannot explain. My Pi was working perfectly on a Raspbian image. I picked up my setup (after doing a shut down) and moved it. When I powered it back up I only got the red power LED. I pulled the power and popped in an SD card with raspbmc loaded and it booted perfectly. So In did research here and thought it may be that the card got corrupted. I downloaded the latest raspbian image and loaded it on the card with no errors. But I am still at the stage of power LED and no boot activity.

Thanks in advance for helping me sort out this mystery!

[Sailing_Nut]

This is strange but I looked at my two cards and when I compared them I noticed that there appeared to be a small piece missing from then side opposite the "notch" by the contacts. So I inserted the card and pressed down on that side and my Pi began to boot. I then released the pressure and in am getting a massive number of errors in the boot process.

What I find odd is that there was no problem with the card when operating it in my USB SD card reader.

Well I guess it's time to invest in another card! Any suggestions on cards that are good size and run fast with the Pi? I'm sure there must he some sort of chart out there but I have not found it yet.

[dan3008]

The main reason your card worked in the pc, but not the pi, is probably to do with the diffrent sizes, or if your pc reader is spring loaded.

As for a good card, theres a list on the wiki. http://elinux.org/RPi_VerifiedPeripherals#SD_cards

Hope that helps

[texy]

I,ve had at least 1 Pi since they were first delivered and I,ve gone through the same problem. I,ve probably ruined 4 SD cards now, where they slowly but surely crack and eventually bits break off and the Pi then no longer recognises that it has a SD card fitted. Some of these still work either in my laptop, or my digital camera, so all is not lost. Make sure you do regular backups of your current SD card though so that you don't lose all your installs/work, etc.
Texy

[yhancik]

Thanks, sailing_nut and texy! I found this post while trying to figure out why my previously working SD card wasn't booting... turns out that, like you, my card was slightly cracked.
I'm not sure what caused this... I thought I had been careful enough - although I carried around the RPi several times, always in its box with the SD card taken off. So maybe it's taking it off and putting it back in several times.
I found people reporting several issues, like http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... =28&t=9154 and maybe http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/qu ... ds-with-pi

I'm a bit annoyed because it's a SD card someone lent me :/

For now I have fixed this by putting a piece of folded paper on top of the SD card that pushes it against the pins (like this).