Bootloader EEPROM on a Raspberry Pi 5: step 4, card in, network cable in, wait for the green light

You are upgrading a locked Raspberry Pi 5, its FLASH WP pads joined (step 3) or tweezers or a short wire ready for them, and now let it write its new bootloader from the card.

Warning

TP1 carries power when the Pi is on. A bridge that touches anything besides TP14 and TP1 can damage the Pi. If yours does, take it off and make it again now, while the Pi is off.

Underside of a Raspberry Pi 5 with the microSD slot ringed on the right edge, a card going in, and the bridge still on the FLASH WP pads

Photo: Suyash Dwivedi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0; annotated, same licence.

Underside of a Raspberry Pi 5 with the microSD slot ringed on the right edge, a card going in, and the bridge still on the FLASH WP pads

Photo: Suyash Dwivedi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0; annotated, same licence.

  1. Push the card into the slot.

  2. Next the network cable goes in, and that powers the Pi. How you do it depends on what joins the pads:

    • A solder bridge on the pads: plug the network cable in.

    • Tweezers or a short wire instead: do these in this order, and read all three before you start.

      The same close-up with the two tips of a pair of tweezers drawn, one on TP14 and one on TP1

      Photo: Suyash Dwivedi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0; annotated, same licence.

      The same close-up with the two tips of a pair of tweezers drawn, one on TP14 and one on TP1

      Photo: Suyash Dwivedi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0; annotated, same licence.

      1. Put one tip of the tweezers (or one end of the wire) on each pad, first.

      2. Then plug the network cable in with your other hand.

      3. Keep the tips on both pads until you pull the network cable in step 5.

    Where the network cable goes, either way: the switch port the Pi was on, into the Ethernet socket, the one beside the two USB blocks. (The drawing shows the Pi top side up; yours is lying upside down.)

    A Raspberry Pi 5, top side up, with its network cable going into the Ethernet socket A Raspberry Pi 5, top side up, with its network cable going into the Ethernet socket

  3. Watch the Pi’s green activity light. When it flashes rapidly, the new bootloader is written and the Pi has stopped: go on to step 5. (Raspberry Pi’s documentation: “On success … the green activity LED is flashed rapidly”, for a card whose image is called pieeprom.bin, as step 1’s is.)

    Give it at least 60 seconds before you decide it is not going to: until it flashes rapidly, leave the cable in. If instead it blinks a repeating pattern of long and short flashes, Raspberry Pi calls that an error code. Write down the pattern and still go on to step 5: on one of our runs a pattern of 3 long and 3 short came after a write that had worked, and step 6 tells which it was. If after five minutes it does neither, go on to step 5 as well, and let step 6 tell.

    Whether the write worked is checked in step 6, after the Pi has started again: the new bootloader date there means it was written; the old date means the new bootloader was not written, and the chart in step 6 sends you back to step 2.