Have heart.
These things discarded do not deserve to find the end of their existence, naked and zapped with static from a nearby nylon sock.
But ...
I purchased a very cheap RPi clone and a few days ago had a real devil of a time getting it to boot. To justify postage costs from the US (charged in high dollars and drop shipped here for nothing, EMS from China), I made up the order with other bits of junk still to be looked at, and my 30 day warranty ran out of promise while life ticked by.
So I powered the board up with [1] a raspberry Pi compatible 2 Amp PSU, [2] a HDMI/ VGA converter dongle [3] a 32GB MicroSD card dd'd with a 6GB debian desktop build distributed by the board's manufacturer!
And was rewarded with a red light, and no video.
Turning to the bare forums, it seems this thing powering converter dongles is not its forte. I whacked it into the TV HDMI and found every boot either failing with (again) no video, or quickly crashing with stack dumps.
The forums say, ye should try a better power supply. So I did (something from BT with an incoming mains RFI filter that almost electrocuted me), gave it a limit of 3A and yet again pretty much the same.
I also verified the sanity of my Samsung 32GB memory card (was it well?, was the image copied correctly?, was the card a fake, er nope..). Got depressed, went shopping on Amazon to cheer myself up, bought a 16GB Sandisk A1 card and something else.
And hey, it booted! Well, for one out of ten attempts. What is this crap?
I gave up, felt more depressed and searched eBay.
I looked at the inflated cost that I could gain selling the pup (as non-working, for parts only) and made it ready to be put aside for that. Some people call that unhappy place, the sock drawer. Mine is a flooded rat infected diseased shed of junk but I digress ...
So I had the other item to play with.
A $2 USB to TTL converter, the first one on -
Finding some strength from somewhere, I connected it to the UART0 pins of the board and with a helping laptop found some communication of an error.
"BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 22s!"
Long story short, I found another OS build (Armbian - nice project, understandably not for Pi), and now the thing is booting 10/10. Somewhere, a manufacturers own support website needs looking at.
This is so slightly beyond what some newbies might want to experience with such a product, that the Raspberry-Pi as a starter makes much more sense.
Tried and tested :)