I'm not sure if very many people are knowledgable about the Raspberry Pi, but I thought I'd ask.
I purchased one about 2 years ago and finally just yesterday started to get it up and running. Here's a summary of what I did and the result:
1) Download
2015-11-21 Raspbian-Jessie (not the lite version) image.
2) Download and install
Win32DiskImager 0.9.5.
3) Burned image onto 16 GB microSD card (Kingston SDC4/16GB 089).
4) Installed SD card in Raspberry Pi. Added power. It seemed to work flawlessly. I connected to Internet via ethernet.
5) After playing around a bit and cycling the power a few times, I decided to get bluetooth up and running. Several sites recommended installing updates and upgrades using the following commands as a first step:
sudo apt-get update (takes about 5-10 minutes)
sudo apt-get upgrade (takes 2-3 hours)
After I completed these commands (the latter does a LOT of stuff), the terminal returned with nothing that alarmed me - it looked like it had just finished installing the last package.
6) Restarted Raspberry Pi via the OS. When it booted up again, it ran a bunch of lines across the terminal, as it normally would, but when it was done, instead of displaying the GUI, it displayed a black screen with a blinking cursor at the top left of the screen. It looked like it was waiting on something, so I let it sit 30 minutes or more, but nothing. I restarted with the same result. I thought maybe something went wrong with the upgrade process so I completely repeated steps 1-5. Same issue.
I'm a bit stumped. At the beginning of the upgrade process I was warned that an additional 100 MB would be installed. I didn't check how much space I had left, but I can't imagine having filled up the SD card completely. Any ideas as to what the issue might be and/or how to fix it?