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I have recently bought a Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB version) and its' original power adapter. I used Balena etcher to flash my sd card, which I have used in my previous raspberries and works properly, but it does not send any signal to the micro HDMI cable I use.

I use a micro HDMI to HDMI adapter, and all the equipment is brand new.

Could this be a faulty raspberry pi, or am I doing something wrong?

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  • This may or may not be relevant, which is why I'm writing a comment rather than an answer. I had exactly the same problem, and it turned out that when I formatted the SD card on Windows using FAT32, it formatted it as exFAT32, because of the large (64GB) SD card size, so the pi couldn't boot from it. I reformatted it using a program called fat32format, and it's booting up fine now.
    – Zac-K
    Aug 13, 2019 at 3:32
  • can you confirm that the Pi is booting (i.e. ssh into it) - could be as simple as bad power supply so the pi isn't even booting (yes, I know you bought a pi 4 power brick, but, lets do some diagnostic work)
    – Jaromanda X
    Aug 13, 2019 at 9:21
  • @JaromandaX I have tried to ssh to it. But it is not discoverable and probably has not even got an IP to ssh to. (I have scanned the lan with nmap and did not find the pi). The sd card is flashed with the latest version of Raspbian and has not been configured to run ssh service at start (I think it is disabled by default and I have to enable it form rpi_config).
    – George Sp
    Aug 13, 2019 at 10:26
  • @BZ1 I did not know that. I will try it and report the results. Just to be clear, you mean to format to FAT32 the sd card and then flash it again, right?
    – George Sp
    Aug 13, 2019 at 10:28
  • @George_Sp Yes. Formatting will obviously remove any data, so you will need to put it back on. I'm not familiar with balena etcher, so I don't know whether it alters the type of filesystem. I was using NOOBS and just copied the data directly onto the card, so whatever filesystem it was formatted as remained the same. Here is the program I used to format it as fat32: ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/guiformat.exe Although Windows will automatically format as exFAT32 when you select FAT32, it displays the correct filesystem when you check afterwards, so you can confirm that it's the correct one.
    – Zac-K
    Aug 13, 2019 at 19:19

3 Answers 3

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In my case I had to re-enter the SD card properly. You may check The Pi Hut for more ideas. I copied them here fore completeness, but Kudos go to them

Wrong HDMI port: The Raspberry Pi 4 has two HDMI ports. The connector on the left marked 'HDMI0' is the primary/default display. If you're using just 1 screen you'll need to use this one.

Re-seat your SD card: If your SD card isn't quite pushed in properly, the Raspberry Pi may show some lights but it won't be working properly. Remove power, take the SD card out, push it back in and try again. Re-write your SD card: Sometimes the operating system can fail on an SD card (even new ones) and needs to be re-written. If you have a card reader, you can follow this very simple process via the Raspberry Pi support page here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

Check Monitor/TV compatibility and settings - (also see the next item) Some TVs and monitors won't display a picture from your Raspberry Pi out of the box - you may need to check your TV resolution and/or change settings to make it work. We find this happens more with TVs/Smart TVs than monitors. There's a great official article on this here which explains the supported resolutions and how to tweak settings: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/hdmi-config.md

Config.txt settings: With some models of TV you may have to undertake a bit of 'trial and error' with the config.txt video settings. There's a great Raspberry Pi article here detailing these settings: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/config-txt/video.md.

Check your monitor's input - sometimes we discover that customers had additional devices connected to other HDMI/VGA ports on their monitor, with the monitor defaulting to these devices rather than the Raspberry Pi. When troubleshooting, it's best to connect just the Raspberry Pi and remove all other connections to your monitor.

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I had the same problem (Pi4 not displaying on the HDMI-screen). Now it works but I do not know why. What did I do:

  • Try another screen wit Pi4: Did not work
  • Resetting SF card: Booting, SSH ok, did not work on screen though
  • Tried both HDMI ports on Pi4: Did not work.
  • Put SD-Card into a Pi3 and tested with same monitor: Worked
  • tried again with Pi4: Got error message that I forgot SD-card
  • Put SD-Card into Pi4: Works fine, including HDMI
  • I keep wondering ...
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I had an issue similar to yours, and buying a new micro-hdmi to hdmi adapter seemed to clear up the issue. There also may be problems with your pi4, but it is highly unlikely.

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