Networking and servers • Raspberry Pi 5 fails to connect to WiFi hotspot despite correct configs

My raspberry Pi 5 previously connected to my phone's WiFi hotspot without issues. After leaving it idle for a week, it now fails to connect despite having seemingly correct configuration files.

I've done the following things which look correct to me:

Used raspberry pi imager to write the 64-bit raspberry pi OS into the SD card, with the wifi settings set in the imager

I noticed that there were no wifi config files even after writing with the imager,
so I created ssh file (0 bytes) and wpa_supplicant.conf on the boot partition

plugged in the SD card to the raspberry pi before powering it with an official power supply

I've double checked that the passwords and the SSID are correct

Below is my wpa_supplicant.conf file:

country=HK
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1

network={
ssid="Caspar9872"
psk="I don't want to expose this"
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}
Then after plugging the power source to the raspberry pi, the LED flashed irregularly in green, and soon (in ten seconds) turned into stable green. The raspberry pi did not appear in my phone's hotspot client list.

But the thing is that I did the exact same thing one week ago, and it worked at that time. Would the cause be a corruption or malfunction of my SD card (SanDisk Ultra 32GB)?

What diagnostic steps can I take to identify why the Pi isn't connecting to WiFi? How can I check if this is an SD card failure vs. WiFi driver issue?

Statistics: Posted by Caspar9872 — Mon Dec 08, 2025 2:19 am

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