SD Card when trying to boot NOOBs

[wdkopsaf]

I have formatted multiple SD cards and loaded NOOBs 1.3 to the card. I Installed into R-Pi and powered on. The power light comes on and the ACT light flashed for 10-15 seconds, then only Power LED on. Removing SD card and installing in PC and card is not recognized or told it needs to be formatted. The cards appear to all be corrupted, is this a known R-Pi issue? This unit was working great for more than 3 weeks with no issues until I tried to save a python file, system froze and I have not been able to get system to come up since..

[gmc]

Try a standard wheezy install and see what happens. Also are you sure your power is ok?

[gsh]

Looks like the monitor you are using doesn't behave very well, try pressing 1, 2, 3 or 4 to switch monitor modes when that green light is flashing, hopefully you'll see something then

[DeeJay]

I have formatted multiple SD cards and loaded NOOBs 1.3 to the card.

Are you carefully following the instructions in the NOOBS README, linked here?

There are many ways of getting this wrong. For example, you should NOT -
- use dd or Win32diskimage to write the SD card
- copy the original downloaded .zip file to the SD card

(It is unlikely that your RPi board has 'died'. There is nothing on the board itself that you can break or render unbootable by software. So if it booted and ran before, there is no reason why it should not boot now.)

[wdkopsaf]

If you don't use the windows writer to load just a img file then what tool do you use? tried NOOBs again and now I get text on screen which appears to be error messages incomplete write, panic+0x88/0x1d4, panic mount_block_root+0x1dc/0x1c8

[wdkopsaf]

Got NOOBs 1.3 to boot, looks like I missed an extraction point. I tried to go from the .zip file directly to the SD card. When I unzipped the NOOBs file, then "extracted all" to a different folder, and copied the extracted files from the folder to the SD card it booted to NOOBs, still loading but feeling good so far.
Thanks for everyone's input, BillK

[wdkopsaf]

Well spoke to soon, go to end of loading up the OS and goy an err trying to write something. Now when I try to reboot I get Red+4 flashing greens in a pattern sort of giving up costing me a fortune in SD cards. Put back in PC and it only sees 1.1GB of 8GB Duane Electric card,
Beagle Bone board with onboard OS looking more and more appealing

[gmc]

Don't give up - its super easy to get the pi going, you are just having some setup problems.

Once the sd card has been formatted and you put it in the PC you wont see the whole 8GB - its supposed to be like that. The SD card wont be ruined, you can just repartition and reformat if you like.

Is there anything on the dispay after the reboot? Can you ping/ssh into the pi?

[anunays]

I have formatted multiple SD cards and loaded NOOBs 1.3 to the card. I Installed into R-Pi and powered on. The power light comes on and the ACT light flashed for 10-15 seconds, then only Power LED on. Removing SD card and installing in PC and card is not recognized or told it needs to be formatted. The cards appear to all be corrupted, is this a known R-Pi issue? This unit was working great for more than 3 weeks with no issues until I tried to save a python file, system froze and I have not been able to get system to come up since..

I am also facing similar issues.
Copied extracted file from NOOBS_v1_2_1 to SD card.
Issue1: Once Card inserted in the board, it is no more detected by windows laptop(winxp7). Tried two cards.
Issue2: After boot when installed RISC OS, after clicking ok on popup "Image applied succesfully", Display went off. Could not see Green LED blikning any more. Restarted the board, but no GREEN LED activity, No Display.
I am stuck here as I dont want to risk more SD cards unless I understand the issue.

[John Bean]

costing me a fortune in SD cards

It is very unlikely that the card is damaged, just that it's in a state that a Windows OS can't understand.

Don't try to reformat it with Windows disk tools, instead download and use a dedicated SD card formatter (as recommended in the instructions!) instead. This will restore the SD card to a "as new" condition.

[DeeJay]

Copied extracted file from NOOBS_v1_2_1 to SD card.

The zip file for NOOBS 1.2.1 contains 8 files and 2 folders (directories). All need to be copied, using standard Windows file copy tools, onto the SD card. So "Copied extracted file", if taken literally, sounds wrong. What file did you copy, and what tool did you use to copy it.

I am stuck here as I dont want to risk more SD cards unless I understand the issue.

There is no risk to your SD cards. NOOBS simply partitions them in a way that Windows, by default, is unable to interpret. If you use the recommended SDFormatter utility to reformat them (which you will already have done once before copying the NOOBS files onto them, if you have followed the instructions... ) they will be returned to a state where Windows can see their full capacity.

Finally, NOOBS v1.3 was released at the end of September 2013 and is now the recommended installer. It is of course available from the Raspberry Pi Downloads Page.