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Today I got a Raspberry Pi 3. When I powered it on for the first time I've putted on my SD Card the last image of Ubuntu Mate, but the red led was on and the green led was flickering and screen blank. So I decided to download Noobs Lite and when I turn on the Pi there's no green led and the red led is on and screen blank. I've formatted correctly and repeated all the steps twice to ensure to not have forgot something.

Can you please help?

UPDATE: My noobs SD Card which was previously 14,4gb, now has 120mb. I think something is working.

UPDATE 2: I've tried a different SD card and still the same problem. I've also tried to use a Power Bank 5V 3A but still nothing.

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  • As a test exercise, I'd recommend flashing a minimalistic OS such as minibian that simply boots into a single user (root) command line shell. If this is successful it might indicate the h/w is probably ok. About the blank screen, it might be a simple case where the pi might not have been happy with screen resolution supported. Does your monitor show something on the lines of "no signal" banner or just a screen full of black pixels ? since the above mentioned OS supports ssh, hooking it up a network might be a good idea as well
    – Shreyas Murali
    Oct 1, 2016 at 2:55

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Lots of issues in one post. I don't see any particular question in there. But I wonder if you have a friend who has a Rpi where you can test SD cards so you at least know the software works?

The basic answer is to start over with NOOBs. If it doesn't work on a particular SD card then try another. I highly recommend nothing larger than 16 GB nor smaller than 4.

In the OP you do not mention what kind of screen. I can only presume HDMI. In which case I start at the basics. 1) is it plugged in? 2) is it turned on? etcetera.

Probably the most diagnotic part of your post is that the red LED is on. That is good; means you have power that is acceptable to the Rpi. And that the green LED is not on, which always means the software (bootloader, etc.) is not trying to read the SD card.

So, based on this little bit of information in the OP, I recommend you start over with a 16 GB micro SD card and format it as FAT, then download a fresh copy of NOOBs and get it over to the SD card. Then boot that.

Feel free to report back here the results. We'd like to know the condition of LEDs and the HDMI display.

Cheers

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On my RPi A+, the green led comes on even if I don't have an sdcard in there at all; the red and green leds come on, and stay on without blinking. (With an sdcard in there, the green light blinks as we know.)

My second RPi is a model 2 B, and just as in the question here, all that comes on -- sdcard or not -- is the red led. With a known good sdcard in there, I get nothing on a serial port terminal. So my working hypothesis is that this Pi is dead. :(

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