LED Blinking 4 Green - Troubleshooting

[mbaker_wv]

Hello,

I was hoping to get some help from the forum please.

I'm trying to troubleshoot my raspberry pi 4 4gb model.

I took the time to review the "Is your Pi not booting? (The Boot Problems Sticky) Sticky but i dont feel this threat is addressing my problem. So in a last ditch effort to either confirm or deny this pi is a paper weight or if its still alive, i turn to the forum for additional help.

Steps I've taken...

1. removed all peripherals from pi and plug in pi power - result: red led stays on and green led blinks 4 times
2. remove pwr from pi, and insert flashed micro-sd card formatted in fat32 (brand-new) with 2020-05-27-raspios-buster-full-armhf.img flashed to card using balenaEtcher application. > applied only pwr to pi > red led stays lit, while the green led blinks 4 times.
3. removed pwr from pi > plugged in the micro-hdmi into hdmi0 and usb keyboard and mouse into usb slots > applied pwr > hoping the screen would show some signs of life.

I have had this pi working before so i know its a good pi, or atleast it was a good pi. I even had the poe hat installed on this pi and while i never got the poe hat to work, i was able to boot into the os and navigate the desktop.

Any Ideas? thanks in advanced

mbaker_wv

[cleverca22]

how are you flashing the sd card?
do you have access to a 3.3v serial adapter?

[mbaker_wv]

ok, just wanted to give a quick update...

I think i jumped the gun posting to the forum. Ive been working on this issue for a few days now and as soon as i posted something on here, i had a moment... ding!

I reformatted the microsd card in fat32 (using sandisk application) but also named the card 'boot' (i dont think i seen this in the documentation, but maybe i overlooked this step) and did a full reformat and not a quick. While i have used the full reformat before, i dont think i named the card 'boot'. I dont know if it made a difference, but it seems to work like a charm now.

Thank you for the reply and sorry for jumping the gun. I just wanted to post my resolution incase someone else had an issue like this... maybe it will help someone else.

mbaker_wv

[cleverca22]

it doesnt matter how you format the card or what fs you format it with

when you write the .img file to the card, all formatting is undone, and its forced to the format that was within the .img file