General discussion • unable to resolve issue

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to recover a Raspberry Pi 5 that only shows a solid red LED and,
when firmware is forced, 4 long + 4 short green flashes.

Here’s what I’ve done and confirmed:

• Power supply verified — 5 V / 5 A USB-C PSU known good (tested on Pi 400).
• SD card and external SSD both contain a fresh 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS and boot fine on a Pi 400.
• Used rpiboot (latest build) from a Windows PC — device connects and loads all BCM2712 firmware
files (`bootcode5.bin`, `memsys*.bin`, `bootmain`, etc.).
• Output shows “Device located successfully”, “Second stage boot server”, and “File read: boot.img”,
proving the SoC and RAM are working.
• However, **there is no “EEPROM type / write enabled / write disabled” line** in verbose output.
It seems the EEPROM is not responding or not writable.
• Tried several official EEPROM images, including `pieeprom-2025-09-23.bin` from the official
GitHub repository.
• Result is always the same 4 long + 4 short blink pattern on power-up.

From the documentation this code means “Unsupported board / unrecognised EEPROM / invalid board ID”.
It looks like the EEPROM chip cannot be accessed.

Is it possible this board has a corrupt or locked EEPROM, or an early board ID not recognised by public firmware?
Can the Foundation or an authorised partner reflash or replace the EEPROM?

Thanks for any guidance — the board still enumerates perfectly with rpiboot, so it seems recoverable if the EEPROM can be written.

Statistics: Posted by Fishingthumper — Mon Oct 13, 2025 4:09 pm

---