Hi everyone and Raspberry Pi team,
I'm having a serious issue with my Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (8GB) that started after a suspected power surge event.
What happened:
I was powering the Pi using the official 5V 3A power adapter through a surge-protected power strip. As soon as I plugged the adapter in, the surge protector’s LED suddenly turned off, which made me suspect a possible power surge or short.
Since that moment, the Pi hasn't booted at all.
Current symptoms:
ACT LED blinks 8 times repeatedly, followed by a pause, then repeats
(This happens whether the SD card is inserted or not)
Red power LED stays solid
No HDMI output
Ethernet port LEDs are completely off
Fan connected to GPIO spins as expected
Tested multiple OS images on the SD card (Raspberry Pi OS Lite & Full, 64-bit)
Same SD card and setup work fine on another Pi 4B → confirms card is OK
What I’ve tried:
I followed the official EEPROM recovery process:
Used Raspberry Pi Imager to flash the "Restore bootloader" image to a clean SD card (FAT32)
Inserted the card and powered up the Pi
After this, the ACT LED started blinking continuously and rapidly, but never stopped.
This suggests that the bootloader was trying to run recovery.bin but didn’t complete successfully.
I don’t have access to an HDMI monitor at the moment, so I couldn't see if any recovery message appeared.
Regardless, the board still does not return to normal boot behavior, and 8 blinks resume once the EEPROM recovery SD is removed.
My concern:
According to the official bootloader error codes, 8 blinks means:
> SDRAM failure
This seems consistent with what happened during the power event. My guess is that the board suffered a hardware-level failure, possibly to the SDRAM or the PMIC.
My question:
Is there any possibility this could still be recoverable?
Could this be a corrupted EEPROM that isn’t fully rewriting itself?
Or does this behavior confirm that the SDRAM is physically damaged?
If anyone has encountered a similar issue (8 blinks), what was the resolution?
I’d greatly appreciate any advice, confirmation, or possible next steps.
Many thanks in advance for your help!
I'm having a serious issue with my Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (8GB) that started after a suspected power surge event.
What happened:
I was powering the Pi using the official 5V 3A power adapter through a surge-protected power strip. As soon as I plugged the adapter in, the surge protector’s LED suddenly turned off, which made me suspect a possible power surge or short.
Since that moment, the Pi hasn't booted at all.
Current symptoms:
ACT LED blinks 8 times repeatedly, followed by a pause, then repeats
(This happens whether the SD card is inserted or not)
Red power LED stays solid
No HDMI output
Ethernet port LEDs are completely off
Fan connected to GPIO spins as expected
Tested multiple OS images on the SD card (Raspberry Pi OS Lite & Full, 64-bit)
Same SD card and setup work fine on another Pi 4B → confirms card is OK
What I’ve tried:
I followed the official EEPROM recovery process:
Used Raspberry Pi Imager to flash the "Restore bootloader" image to a clean SD card (FAT32)
Inserted the card and powered up the Pi
After this, the ACT LED started blinking continuously and rapidly, but never stopped.
This suggests that the bootloader was trying to run recovery.bin but didn’t complete successfully.
I don’t have access to an HDMI monitor at the moment, so I couldn't see if any recovery message appeared.
Regardless, the board still does not return to normal boot behavior, and 8 blinks resume once the EEPROM recovery SD is removed.
My concern:
According to the official bootloader error codes, 8 blinks means:
> SDRAM failure
This seems consistent with what happened during the power event. My guess is that the board suffered a hardware-level failure, possibly to the SDRAM or the PMIC.
My question:
Is there any possibility this could still be recoverable?
Could this be a corrupted EEPROM that isn’t fully rewriting itself?
Or does this behavior confirm that the SDRAM is physically damaged?
If anyone has encountered a similar issue (8 blinks), what was the resolution?
I’d greatly appreciate any advice, confirmation, or possible next steps.
Many thanks in advance for your help!
Statistics: Posted by SkyR — Mon Jul 28, 2025 8:36 pm