I orderd the Raspberry Pi Zero W Starter Kit and have had it for less than a month. It was running flawlessly, sitting next to my router and running pi-hole as a DNS server. Today the Pi stopped working. I tried restarting it with no cables attached only power cable that came with the starter kit. I’ve also tried restarting by trying all permutations of the SD card, USB cable and HMDI being plugged in and unplugged, and that did not work. I’ve tested the power supply by plugging it in some portable headphones I have and I got a charge so I don’t think it’s the power supply. This is my first Raspberry Pi. They are pretty cheap, so is it that the hardware in it is poor quality that it is common for it to stop working like this after a month? Any troubleshooting tips you could offer would be great. Or is it possible to get a replacement if faulty?
I found a website that mentioned the faulty SD cards can cause it not to boot and there is no BIOS screen like you get on desktops, so if the SD card is bad nothing will display on the screen connected via HDMI. I managed to find an SD card in an old mobile phone, installed fresh OS on that and gave that a go. Booted up fine. So it’s a bad SD card. If anyone from Core Electronics is out there monitoring this forum, any chance of me getting a replacement card? It’s the SD I got with the starter kit I ordered from you about a month ago.
Hi Craig,
For faulty parts/returns you’re probably best just sending Core an email directly. But yeah, SD cards do fail sometimes, especially if you’re doing a lot of read/write cycles on them (e.g. putting your swap space on an SD card).
Hi Craig and Oliver,
That’s correct. I’d recommend sending through an email to support@coreelectronics.com.au and we’ll get this sorted out for you right away. 
Bryce
Core Electronics | Support
