My new raspberry pi just arrived yesterday. After plugging all the required peripherals and powering on, I noticed the connected monitor just show colored canvas and “ACT” led beside the Power LED remains off. I used canna kit PSU with 2.5A current rating which I used in my working RPi2 B+. Tried to used SD card of my working RPi 2 B+ but still not working.
Hi Chris, thanks for bringing your question to the forum.
It sounds like there might be a compatibility issue. Are you running Raspbian (with NOOBS?). Old versions of NOOBS are known to work on a Pi2 but not on a Pi3.
You will need to perform a few updates to bring things up to speed for the pi 3
If you have an important project running from the SD card, it will be prudent to make a backup image before you start.
If you don’t care about losing the contents of the SD card then you can just download a fresh version of NOOBS and you should be good to go!
I haven’t attempted the following, but according to this source it is the method of migrating from a Pi2 to a Pi3
On your Pi 2, from the terminal execute:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
You should then update your Raspbian distribution with
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
This will upgrade your distribution to the newest Raspbian + PIXEL distro.
Next we need to update the kernel, or NOOBS will still get stuck at the rainbow screen.
Download a fresh version of NOOBS (not NOOBS Lite) unzip and copy the files bootcode.bin, recovery.elf, recovery.img and recovery7.img to the recovery partition on the SD card.
With that step complete the card should now be prepared to boot a RasPi 3.
Best of luck! Let me know your thoughts.
– Michael
Hi Michael,
I did that command a night before because I need to install AWS CLI on the Pi2. One thing I noticed though, I tried to compare the behavior of the “ACT” led of both pi’s without an SD card. The working PI has blinking “ACT” led right after power on even without the sd card. I didn’t noticed that in the new RPi3, only the red power led was lit.
Hi @chris12326,
Ok, well there’s not many moving parts and if you are certain you have tried the latest version then package it up and send it back to us. Our mailing address can be found here (use the PO Box). Include a copy of your invoice and a quick note of the issue.
We’ll check it out and will organize a replacement if need be.
