Pi Zero 2 W Green LED + but not booting?

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Hi everyone,

I’ve just bought a Pi Zero 2 W and I seem to have fallen at the first hurdle. I’ve created a fresh SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager, using Bullseye and some custom config to enable SSH and get it connected to my network.

I’ve inserted this SD card into the Pi and attached a USB cable to the PWR IN slot, and a HDMI cable (via Mini HDMI adapter) to the HDMI output. All components and the display it’s connected to are known good, and work with other devices just fine.

The green ACK LED illuminates after a second, and stays a solid green. It doesn’t blink or anything, it just stays a solid green.

After waiting for a few minutes, nothing appears on the screen. I’ve tried connecting it to other displays, which doesn’t change anything, still nothing appears. It is also not accessible via SSH.

I’ve logged into my router and noted that the Pi hasn’t connected to the network.

I’ve read through this post (STICKY: Is your Pi not booting? (The Boot Problems Sticky) - Raspberry Pi Forums), which prompted me to try connecting the Pi via the USB OTG port to my PC - my PC did recognise the Pi and it showed up in device manager.

This all leads me to believe the Pi is not dead on arrival and SHOULD boot - but what is confusing is that green LED lighting up, as I’ve watched videos that suggest it should flash as it reads the SD card rather than just staying solid.

I tried re-writing the SD card and before inserting it into the Pi, I added a little bash command to the firstrun.sh file that’s in the boot partition to see if it gets that far:

touch ./debug.txt

After re-inserting the SD card again, this file is not created in the boot partition.

Does anyone have any ideas?

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Edit: ops sorry, messed up what OS version you were running somehow. I think I need another cup of Java. =(
Nothing to see here move along.

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Have you tried another SD card? I’d expect more blinkenlights if it was faulty, but it’s the cause of more of my Pi failures than almost anything else…

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Thanks for getting back to me @ahnlak - I went and got another SD card today (didn’t cheap out this time) and now it’s happy. Problem solved!

For any future readers - I was previously using a PNY 32GB Class 10 rated card. I’ve now bought a Sandisk Extreme 32GB Class 10 U3 micro SD card and this works fine.

TIL: The Pi is VERY sensitive to cheaper SD cards. I’d be interested to know what’s wrong with the PNY SD card as that’s relatively new as well…

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