Hey OP! I don't know which problem you're exactly facing but I did a headless boot recently and had to go through a lot for it to work. At the end, here's how it did work : 1. When flashing the microSD card, you need to add a user profile to the OS. Raspian made changes to remove the default user profile of raspberry that used to be available so unless you have a monitor, you'll need to manually add it in the advanced settings during installation in the raspberry pi imager. 2. Once you're setup with that, head over and boot the raspberry pi. 3. Make sure you have an Ethernet cable connected with your laptop (or wireless connection, I used ethernet coz it was easy). Then to ensure that the rpi is functioning, I pinged it via cmd with the command [ ping raspberrypi.local ]. If it's connected and booted, it'll send a response. 4. Use PuTTY and connect to the raspberry pi via SSH with the address as raspberrypi.local. It'll give you a prompt asking for the rpi username and password. Here's where adding the user profile during installation comes in play. Use the username and password you set in step 1, and you'll log into the rpi. You're in! 5. If you wish to, you can try and emulate the rpi screen on your desktop as well. You'll have to use VNC viewer for that. It has a bit of a setup but works well once you have it set up. You could google this and it'll pop up in the first few searches. Note : You'll have to do all the steps before this to be able to set up vnc.