How Do You Get a Raspberry Pi to Work Again after Two GPIO Pins Were Connected When They Should Not Have Been?

Problem scenario
You recently connected a jumper connector to two GPIO pins accidentally on your Raspberry Pi. Now your Raspberry Pi will not start, and it seems fried. There is a red light that is on. There is no flashing light and no green light. There is no output to the monitor. You are not sure if the Raspberry Pi is wasted.

Solution
1. Remove the jumper connector from the GPIO pins. Either get a MicroSD card from a working Raspberry Pi and skip the rest of these steps (to test the Raspberry Pi), or get a new blank MicroSD card. It may be that the original MicroSD card is not usuable.

2. Open a web browser and go to http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/NOOBS_latest. Download the .zip file. (To download the large zip file to a specific location, see this posting if you have a Windows desktop.)

3. Place the MicroSD card into a card reader so you can access it with the Windows desktop.

4. Put the contents of the zip file (step #2) on to the MicroSD card (step #3).

5. Now the MicroSD card should allow the Raspberry Pi to work.

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