Parallella Community

I'm trying to boot the Parallella for the first time using 15.04 HDMI version and I cannot get it working.

Here's a summary of what's going on...

I see three green LEDs lit up on the board itself, all steady.
Ethernet. Green LED comes on for a few seconds, then the orange LED flashed continuously (forever apparently...).
USB micro to USB adapter with wireless dongle connecting a keyboard/touchpad combo.
HDMI micro to HDMI connected. I see a white underscore character in the top left and nothing more...ever. No boot messages, but the monitor at least thinks it has a valid HDMI connection.
Power supply (the one the Parallella 16 came with).
16GB microSD with 15.04 HDMI version for my board: Zynq 7010 version.

I cannot see the MAC address from my router and I could not find an IP with a port scan. I have no way to SSH into the board or to see boot message (I don't have a serial cable).

I tried the same setup with various alternate cables and microSD cards of various brands and sizes. Nothing works.

Any ideas on what I can do short of buying a serial cable and debugging it from there?

Thanks,
Michael

90% of the time, the problem is not burning the SD card correctly (that includes me!)
Just to verify I picked a new HDMI monitor I had and a new P1601 card. No problem with the new image.

just in case you don't believe me...
(btw, for the record, USB on a randomly sampled board came up 2/2 with new image)

Setup:
DELL monitor, 1920x1200 resoluion (hdmi input)
unpowered micro-->USB dongle
K330 logic vision wireless keyboard/mouse

I suspect it's my USB microSD reader/writer that is misbehaving. I was wondering why dd seemed to run so quickly.
I'll pick up a new reader/writer adapter and create another image to see how that goes and will report back.

I tried a new microSD reader/writer and this time burned the image on a Mac. I mounted the image and the boot partition looked fine.
However, I still cannot bring up the Parallella. The HDMI now kicks out instead of showing the "_" character in the top left of the screen.
And now the ethernet port green light stays on and the orange light never comes on.

I cannot see the board MAC address from my router.

I ordered a serial cable to debug this, but I fear the board may be dead. It's odd, because I can see the 3 green LEDs lit on the board which should indicate it's healthy.