If you’ve done everything you’ve known how to get a Raspberry Pi Zero W (v1.1) to work but can’t get it to boot up and recognize the Wifi, there’s a chance you may have a defective board.

Setup

After purchasing you should have been able to do this to get it working:

Instead, research has led me to reach the same conclusions as these other people who have had the same issues with their RP0W

Running rpi-update updated the firmware but hardware was still reporting bad results.

cat /sys/firmware/devicetree/base/model
Raspberry Pi Model B Rev 2

cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor	: 0
model name	: ARMv6-compatible processor rev 7 (v6l)
BogoMIPS	: 697.95
Features	: half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java tls
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant	: 0x0
CPU part	: 0xb76
CPU revision	: 7

Hardware	: BCM2835
Revision	: 000f
Serial	: 00000000dbe19693

uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 4.9.50+ #1035 Wed Sep 13 22:53:09 BST 2017 armv6l GNU/Linux

Tried to update with force_board_rev=0x9000c1 in config.txt but to no avail. I had to return my board to the seller, who promptly confirmed it was a faulty board. If you can reproduce these signs for your board, it is likely faulty.