Raspberry PI won’t boot black screen and one solid red light

My Raspberry PI arrived today so I downloaded the Raspberry image and tried to write it to the SD card (my laptop had a SD card reader built-in) with Win32DiskImage but Win32DiskImage could not see my SD card, there was no drive/device showing.

The next thing I tried was DD for Windows this seam to work and completed without errors but my Raspberry PI would not boot, it just had a black screen and one solid red light.

Here are a few tips

1. If windows Disk management does not show your SD card Win32DiskImage will not see it as a device

2. The Raspberry PI has no BIOS, it boots off the SD card so it cannot display anything on screen if it cannot read the SD card

3. After you have wrote the image to the SD card you should be able to see the FAT partition in Windows, you will see some files like config.txt, bootcode.bin and others

Solution

I purchased a usb card reader,  and Win32DiskImage could see the SD card and I wrote the image, then the Raspberry PI booted.

The SD cards I have tested are SanDisk SDHC 8GB type 4 and I have also tried a SanDisk type 10 without any problems.