Installer won't boot, blinking screen

[contezero360]

Hello everyone, i had tried almost everything to boot ubuntu mate 15.10 on my raspberry pi2 but still i have no installer. The screen start to blinks and i can't do anything.
Please help

[lah7]

I presume this is the first boot that is failing. There could be a few reasons:

• Your micro-SD card may not have been imaged properly, try flashing it again.

• The download may be corrupt, perform a MD5 checksum and compare it with what it's supposed to be for Ubuntu MATE 15.10:

  7f110f5ddaa512a361ff172c12665f11
  --- https://ubuntu-mate.org/raspberry-pi/

• Something plugged in to the Pi is causing problems, like a faulty USB device. (Potentially?)

• If you're powering the Pi via a USB from another device (ie. computer or TV, which shouldn't be used), use an actual power adapter instead from the mains.

If it still happens, there could be a chance it's a faulty micro-SD card.

[wolfman]

Also make sure you fully format your bootable media before placing the ISO on it.

[Purusharth_Saxena]

@lah7 I am also having the same problem, I am certain that my SD card is not faulty as installed NOOBS on it (after the unsuccessful attempt to install MATE) which worked perfectly.
I don't have any USB cable plugged in, not even the Ethernet cable.
I am using HDMI to DVI-D input for display and i have already un-commented hdmi_force_hotplug=1 in config.txt(which i didn't have to do for noobs). I am stuck, i don't get a display, not even the colorful splash screen

[lah7]

@contezero360 and @Purusharth_Saxena = Which program are you using to "flash" the image to the card? Is it being imaged from Windows?

NOOBS is quite different, since the card is formatted as FAT first then it's as simple as copying over the files. Ubuntu MATE requires the image to be written "in-place", as it has its own partition structure (I believe 2 partitions - one of them being FAT).as well as a different filesystem containing Ubuntu MATE (which would be unreadable under Windows).

If the image is written correctly, the boot sequence should go like this:

1. Colourful image (GPU initialization)
2. 4 Raspberry Pi's in the corner, blinking cursor.
3. Text-based splash screen.
4. Graphical desktop / installer.

[Gary_Marshall]

I was having the same problem, I could not get the Ubuntu Mate image to run from my SD card. I tried and successfully ran raspian, ubuntu snappy, even windows IoT from this card on the Raspberry Pi, but not Ubuntu Mate; I tried making the boot SD from an Ubuntu desktop machine and via a Windows install. After reading the above messages, I decided to try one last time with the raspberry pi plugged into the a television via hdmi instead of the hdmi/dvi adapter I was using with an older dvi monitor and it booted right up. For me, it has something to do with the hdmi/dvi adapter and/or monitor. The Ubuntu Mate installer had run when attached to the monitor, just couldn’t see the screen image, I think, because the screen message asked for a reboot when restarted attached to the tv and then ran thru the full install with user creation, etc. So, there is some issue with the Ubuntu Mate video displaying correctly on my monitor via an hdmi cable and hdmi to dvi adapter that wasn’t problem with the other packages.

Note: see now that highsider described the same problem in another topic…My monitor is also an older Dell.

[TxRaven]

After several failed attempts to create Ubuntu-Mate boot sd card from my Ubuntu machine, I decided to try to create one from my Windows box. I reformatted my sd card with SDFormatter and wrote the image file to it with Win32DiskImager.

I decided to try this after re-reading the Raspberry Pi image installation guides.
"https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/README.md"

This worked like a charm for me and I hope it will work for you too.