Tow-Boot, a new U-Boot option for Pinephone Pro and other devices

[woodeen]

For what it is worth I thought I would share my experience installing Tow-Boot to the SPI flash on my PPP EE, and Mobian to the eMMC. I had been running Mobian from the SD card with the standard U-Boot. I followed the instructions for installing Tow-Boot as described here, and then flashed the latest Mobian image to the eMMC following both Method 3 (i.e., using dd) as described  here, and again using Method 1 (using a graphical flashing app) from my desktop computer. I was able to access Tow-Boot's "jump drive" mode by holding the volume up key at boot, and I could boot into the Mobian SD card holding the volume down key at boot, but when I tried to boot the eMMC install I had an endless loop of red light, phone vibrates, no light, followed by yellow light, phone vibrates, then the whole process would repeat endlessly with no successful boot from the eMMC.

The way I finally successfully installed Mobian to the eMMC was by booting to Mobian on the SD card and then following the instructions for flashing to the eMMC that are given in the Pine Phone Pro wiki page. All seems to be working fine now