Raspberry Pi Rev B ACT (green) LED flashes 8 times?

I've also tried an almost new Sandisk Micro SD card in an Sandisk Micro -> SC card holder.  This worked fine in my GoPro, which is usually quite demanding... so it should be OK here.

I've got a dedicated 1200ma power supply, plus I've tried powering it from my PC... no change in behaviour.

I'm booting it "blind" so to speak, with no peripherals except for the SD card and an ethernet cable... but from what I've read this should be OK, as it should appear on the network for me to ssh into it.  It never gets past this "8 flash" problem, and doesn't even enable the ethernet port because the switch doesn't get any link status.

I'm thinking I've got a dud unit, but I never like to blame the hardware until I've exhausted every avenue.

I got NOOBS to boot... or at least I think it booted, as the activity lights were blinking and the network was enabled.  I've not got a screen to check, so maybe I'll have to scrounge one from somewhere, but we're all laptop based and I've not got any of these new-fangled HDMI monitors. <sigh>

NOOBS really expects you to have a screen connected.  You'd be better off with Raspbian which, unless it's changed again, starts an ssh server on boot.  I've also used Arch successfully headless. You need to find out what the IP address is of the newly-booted machine, either by trial and error, or by looking at your router's DHCP allocation and seeing which entry is added when the Pi boots.

Was NOOBs on a different SD card?  I looked in the supported cards list, and while all Lexars were supported, the only class 8 card in the listed was marked as not usable.

One other thing - you can easily use a DVI screen with an HDMI-DVI adapter.

Thanks simon3270,

I tried Raspbian on both a 32G Sandisk, and an 8G Lexar class 4.  I created them on the mac in two different ways, and also on my PC.  Each result was the same... it powers on (red LED), and then immediately it started flashing the ACT (green LED) 8 times... wait... 8 times... wait... etc.

The network port never gets enabled, so it never gets an IP from my router.

When I tried NOOBS (with the same SD cards), it booted, the activity light flashed intermittently, and the network port was enabled... but it wasn't available on the network because as I suspected NOOBS needs a screen/keyboard.  That pretty much proves to me that the hardware is OK, and it's something to do with my Raspbian install.

I checked the checksums after download, and it's a perfect match... and no matter which technique or PC I use to create the card I get the same result.  At least you've confirmed that I should be able to ssh into it after Raspbian boots, so I think I'll persevere.  I just found a Samsung 4G, class 4 card... so I'll give that a try.

Just to double check... when Raspbian boots for the very first time, it doesn't need any configuration before I can ssh into it with username/password pi/raspberry, right?  The only difficult part is finding out which IP it's received from the router, but I know where to look so that should be simple.

Cheers.
Greg.

If only I knew that the "8 green flashes" meant, maybe it would put me on the right track. <sigh>

I tried, but the Samsung SD card has the same issue... so it's got to be something I'm doing wrong with loading the OS onto the SD card, but I can't see what.

I've downloaded the Raspbian "wheezy" form here:

http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/images/raspbian/2013-05-25-wheezy-raspbian/2013-05-25-wheezy-raspbian.zip

I've tried writing the card with my Mac, using the GUI, Command line, and "install" script methods, plus on my PC using Win32DiskImager, as per these instructions:

http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup

If I plug the card back into my PC/Mac after writing it then I can see the first filesystem that should be there.  Here is what they all look like:

gregs_macbook:boot root# df -h /Volumes/boot
Filesystem     Size   Used  Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk4s1   56Mi   18Mi   37Mi    34%     512     0  100%   /Volumes/boot

gregs_macbook:boot root# cd /Volumes/boot

gregs_macbook:boot root# ls -al
total 37856
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 _unknown  _unknown    16384 Jul 25 17:31 .
drwxrwxrwt@ 5 root      admin         170 Jul 25 17:48 ..
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 _unknown  _unknown     8192 Jul 25 17:31 .Trashes
-rwxrwxrwx  1 _unknown  _unknown     4096 Jul 25 17:31 ._.Trashes
drwxrwxrwx  1 _unknown  _unknown     8192 Jul 25 17:48 .fseventsd
-rwxrwxrwx  1 _unknown  _unknown    17808 May 25 16:58 bootcode.bin
-rwxrwxrwx  1 _unknown  _unknown      142 May 25 17:38 cmdline.txt
-rwxrwxrwx  1 _unknown  _unknown     1180 May 25 17:38 config.txt
-rwxrwxrwx  1 _unknown  _unknown     5880 May 25 16:58 fixup.dat
-rwxrwxrwx  1 _unknown  _unknown     2012 May 25 16:58 fixup_cd.dat
-rwxrwxrwx  1 _unknown  _unknown     8830 May 25 16:58 fixup_x.dat
-rwxrwxrwx  1 _unknown  _unknown      137 May 25 18:58 issue.txt
-rwxrwxrwx  1 _unknown  _unknown  2803168 May 25 16:58 kernel.img
-rwxrwxrwx  1 _unknown  _unknown  9610248 May 25 16:58 kernel_emergency.img
-rwxrwxrwx  1 _unknown  _unknown  2688564 May 25 16:58 start.elf
-rwxrwxrwx  1 _unknown  _unknown   467960 May 25 16:58 start_cd.elf
-rwxrwxrwx  1 _unknown  _unknown  3655652 May 25 16:58 start_x.elf

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The Mac tells me that it's FAT-16, which is mildly concerning.  I did try reformatting it as FAT-32 and putting the files back in place... but that didn't work either.  I'm sure I'm over-complicating things and there is a simple step I'm missing, but I can't for the life of me figure out what that is.

I still have no idea what the "8 flashes" issue is, but the new image fixed the fault.

Glad it worked, and you now get to play with the wonderful Raspberry Pi!

I wonder whether the earlier raspbian was slightly stressing some hardware which works, but is close to its limits? Possibly a single memory location which is accessed by the old firmware, but not by the new?

Yes, I wondered the same thing myself... or maybe I've got a new-ish board that needed the most current software.  Who knows with these computer thingybobs. :-)