Our new Pi3 B (bought from Pimoroni this month) has been freezing under light load, e.g. web browsing and now it won’t reboot at all when I remove and replace the power plug. There is a constant red light. Taking out and reinserting the microSD doesn’t help and, when I plug that card into a Windows PC, it does not recognise the new drive/card. The card was one bought from Pimoroni with the Pi with NOOBS pre-loaded etc. Should I be doing anything else? Thanks.
It sounds like the SD card might be corrupted. I’d recommend re-imaging the card, as per the instructions at the link below.
Have you been unplugging the device without shutting down?
Try installing zRam on a fresh install:
You might be using a too low power supply, unless your Pi came with a kit.
Yes, what sort of power supply are you using?
5.1V / 2.5A offical RP power supply.
Thanks. Only took power plug out as a last resort when the Pi did not recover after freezing. Usually we have been shutting down using the menu options.
Thanks - I assume I’ll need to use a different card as the one I have isn’t recognised by Windows.
NOTE: I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE IF YOU ACCIDENTALLY DESTROY YOUR MAIN PARTITION ON YOUR HARD DRIVE/SSDRIVE
Now that’s out of the way, You may be able to use the same card. Note down the capacity and open start. Type in diskpart. Once a CMD window opens, type list disk. Find the card with the capacity you noted down earlier. If you have nothing else plugged into your system, the micro SD card will likely show as disk 1. Now say select disk (number of disk).
Replace (number of disk) with the number, like 1. I.e. it will be select disk 1.
Make sure you selected your disk and not YOUR MAIN HARD DRIVE. Now type clean. It should return “diskpart succeeded in cleaning the disk.”
Finally, say create partition primary
Diskpart will say “Diskpart succeeded in creating the specified partition”
Now your MicroSD Card should be working!
better yet just try a brand new card. If you quick format (fat32) and it slows or pauses at spots instead of smoothly , consistent speed, in its formatting chances are it has some bad spots in the card. I have had alot of issues with poor quality, second inventory, refurbished, and counterfeit micro sd cards on Ebay, it seems to be real popular scam these days. many even look like name brand class 10s but are not. Best just buy a new good brand class 10, 8-16gb from a store in person (or order from pimoroni or adafruit) not from auction sites though.
I think Michael mentioned that it was a NOOBS card that he bought from us that was having issues? Anyhow, I’d recommend a reformat and reimage as the first step, as that can often sort things out.
If Windows doesn’t see the card (not uncommon with cards formatted for the Raspberry Pi, even the boot partition can have issues) then try SD Formatter: https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/
Open the options and make sure you’re doing a quick format with “Size Adjust” on, and it should get the card back to a state where you can copy in the NOOBS files, or image Raspbian using Win32DiskImager.