Raspberry Pi Act LED Error Patterns
If your Raspberry Pi board isn’t booting, and the green ‘Act’ LED is flashing, count the number of flashes to look up which of the following issues that indicates.
While booting, the ACT LED should blink in an irregular pattern, indicating that it is reading from the card. If it starts blinking in a regular, Morse code-like pattern, then it is signalling an error.
Booting
With a PI that is not booting (for example when the SD-Card is not inserted) the default behavior is:
- Model 1 (A and B) green LED is initially OFF (flickering ON means the model 1 is booting)
- Model 2 (A and B) green LED is initially ON (flickering OFF means the model 2 is booting)
- Model 3 (A and B) green LED is initially OFF (flickering ON means the model 3 is booting)
- Model zero (or Zero W) only has green ACT led which is initially OFF (flickering ON when booting)
LED warning flash codes
If a Raspberry Pi fails to boot for some reason, or has to shut down, in many cases an LED will flash a specific number of times to indicate what happened. The LED will blink for a number of long flashes (0 or more), then produce short flashes, to indicate the exact status. In most cases, the pattern will repeat after a two-second gap.
| Long flashes | Short flashes | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 3 | Generic failure to boot |
| 0 | 4 | start*.elf not found |
| 0 | 7 | Kernel image not found |
| 0 | 8 | SDRAM failure |
| 0 | 9 | Insufficient SDRAM |
| 0 | 10 | In HALT state |
| 2 | 1 | Partition not FAT |
| 2 | 2 | Failed to read from partition |
| 2 | 3 | Extended partition not FAT |
| 2 | 4 | File signature/hash mismatch - Pi 4 |
| 3 | 1 | SPI EEPROM error - Pi 4 |
| 3 | 2 | SPI EEPROM is write protected - Pi 4 |
| 3 | 3 | I2C error - Pi 4 |
| 3 | 4 | Secure-boot configuration is not valid |
| 4 | 3 | RP1 not found |
| 4 | 4 | Unsupported board type |
| 4 | 5 | Fatal firmware error |
| 4 | 6 | Power failure type A |
| 4 | 7 | Power failure type B |
If you have a PI5
You can try to boot without and SD-Card (or other boot media) in place, as then you will get a boot diagnostic screen.
Source
Forum | STICKY: Is your Pi not booting? (The Boot Problems Sticky)