Having trouble setting up headless Zero W

[pihasforsakenme]

Hello,

Sorry if I am posting this in the wrong place, but I have been stuck for a while trying to figure out what is going on. I am trying to setup a Zero W headless but I keep running into different errors its weird, I will describe my entire process below.

Download Raspbian Buster Lite. Download balenaethcer app and flash the OS onto the SD card. Now I open my SD card [boot(D:)] and create two files inside of boot, wpa_supplicant.conf and ssh. Then I download putty 64-bit msi installer and install putty onto my pc. Then I put my SD card into the Pi and power the pi. Open the putty and put in raspberrypi.local into the host name (i have also used the IP address for the Pi but that gives the same error). Then the putty terminal window opens and there are no prompts in the window to login. Then after about 5 seconds I get an "Network error: Software caused connection short".

I have uninstalled and reinstalled everything that was downloaded multiple times.

Also I have run into other errors: During my first attempt I actually logged in changed my host name and password and enabled VNC and then opened RealVNC and got a hostname and password error, which made no sense (after doing this I reflashed my SD card and tried to restart the process). I seem to get a different error every time, but now I am stuck at the putty failure. If there is any help or anything I should to fix this, it would be greatly appreciated. This is the first experience with the Pi and so far I keep getting stuck.

Thanks for any help and sorry if I posted this in the wrong place.

[peppe8o]

Hi pihasforsakenme,
it seems a connection issue. Some suggested checks:

SD card flashing

• run Etcher as administrator and check that flashing ends successfull

Raspbian installation (you can also refer to this guide - https://peppe8o.com/2019/07/install-ras ... pberry-pi/)

• verify that your wpa_supplicant.conf content is correct

IP identification

• check the IP address you are pointing is correct. A simple ping from your PC is enought

Putty configuration

• be sure that you have Port set to 22 (SSH)

Hope this can help you.

[pihasforsakenme]

Thanks I am fiddled around with some stuff and I am finally in.

But now when I try sudo reboot, I get "Putty Fatal Error: Remote side unexpectedly closed connection" and I am scared to create a new host name and password because it will ask to reboot, and if I get an error during a reboot after I change my password I might get locked out. Is there anything I can do to fix this error, I've been trying to google it but nothing really comes up for this specific error.

Thanks for any help!

[drgeoff]

But now when I try sudo reboot, I get "Putty Fatal Error: Remote side unexpectedly closed connection" and I am scared to create a new host name and password because it will ask to reboot, and if I get an error during a reboot after I change my password I might get locked out. Is there anything I can do to fix this error, I've been trying to google it but nothing really comes up for this specific error.

Thanks for any help!

That is a PEBKAC error.

Of course putty will report that. A reboot shuts down everything on the RPi. ssh server stops. Network stops. What do you expect?

[pihasforsakenme]

I understand that...lol don't need to be condescending when I am asking a question in order to avoid issues in the future

But the last time I tried to re-name the host name and password and got prompted with a reboot, I got locked out of the pi basically. Cuz I rebooted and got that error, then when I restarted the session my old credentials and new credentials did not work at all, so I started from scratch. I was just wondering why something like that happened because I don't want it to happen again