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I have bought a raspberry pi 4 B. But I don't have a powerfull enough power suply, and won't be able to get one in a couple of days. IS

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    Try it. it won't do any harm. Worst you'll get is it crashes. If the power supply isn't good enough you'll get the yellow lightning bolt on the screen.
    – Dougie
    Commented May 7, 2020 at 22:30
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    Crashes and possibly corrupted file system on SD card. Commented May 8, 2020 at 12:45
  • The question and description seems mismatching. How about an edit? Commented May 9, 2020 at 4:12

2 Answers 2

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It’s not a good thing to do.

At any point the WiFi network could drop, the processor reset, the SD card get corrupt. It took me nearly 3 weeks to identify what was causing me issues with my 3B+ before I twigged on and bought a power supply and not a charger.

Save yourself a lot of frustration and get the correct supply first.

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The worst that can happen is that the Pi would crash.

The Pi itself will run even with the warning (as it only needs 3.3V) USB peripherals may not work.

I have tested various Pi models with variable voltages. All work down to 4V See Raspberry Pi Power Limitations

NOTE I do not recommend this as normal practice.

The risk of OS corruption due to low power is greatly exaggerated. Only removing power while the Pi is actively writing to SD Card poses a risk, but even then the journalling generally recovers the file system.

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  • The risk of OS corruption due to low power is greatly exaggerated. Depends on the number of restarts. Agreed read/ writes rarely error but restarts kill OS with delayed writes :-(
    – user115418
    Commented May 8, 2020 at 0:01

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