Booting a RPI 1 B+

[Toby]

On 31/12/15 00:36, Tim Kientzle wrote:

> You should consider getting a USB serial adapter cable such as:
> 
>    http://adafru.it/954
> 
> This will let you see the earliest boot messages and any errors that may be appearing.
> 
> As others have mentioned, it's worth trying different SDHC cards, since the SD drivers do not seem to be compatible with all cards.

I can only second the former. I managed to fill my disk with a typo in a
dd command on a running pi, after which I never got it to boot again
with just a blank screen on hdmi. With a USB serial adapter, I could
have fixed the problem right away.
Instead, I needed to write the sd card content to a file, copy the file
to a freebsd vm (my primary machine is a mac and can't mount UFS rw),
fsck it there, mount it, fix the damage, unmount and write the file back
to the sd card.

As for the latter, Transcend cards have worked fine for me.

Toby