Debugging steps

With the following steps, you will probably find its status:

Take your board, with nothing in any slot or socket. Remove even the microSD card!
Take a normal micro-USB to USB-ADATA sync cable and connect one side to your computer and the other side to the Pi's USB (not the PWR_IN).
If Zero is alive:

On Windows, the PC will make a ding sound to inform the presence of new hardware, and you will see BCM2708 Boot in Device Manager.
- On Linux, with a ID 0a5c:2763 Broadcom Corp message from dmesg, try running dmesg in a terminal before you plug in the USB. After this, you will find a new record there.

The following is an example of the output:

[226314.048026] usb 4-2: new full-speed USB device number 82 using uhci_hcd [226314.213273] usb 4-2: New USB device found, idVendor=0a5c, idProduct=2763 [226314.213280] usb 4-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0 [226314.213284] usb 4-2: Product: BCM2708 Boot
[226314.213] usb 4-2: Manufacturer: Broadcom

If you see any of the preceding options, so far so good, you know that Zero's not dead.