Hi All;
I was trying to flash my emmc on Pinephone Pro and by mistake I erased instead my U-boot. I used an sd-card for the day and once the battery was drained the phone went into mass rom mode and I can no longer power it on.
After recharging the battery from a power station I tried to switch it on unsuccessfully. I tried as well the recovery mode (using the RE button on the back and it would work).
I can no longer see the device when running the lsblk command. However I see the rockship in mass rom mode when I run the lsusb command from my linux labtop.

I read few instruction and a script provided by the rkdeveloptool-master to flash the memory and see if I can copy across a new bin file (rk3399_loader_spinor_v1.15.114.bin) and from there being able to move out of the mass rom mode and use again the sd card. It was not successful.

I was wondering if there is U-boot image available that I can use and how can I copy it across to my phone memory since I am still on mass rom mode. I guess there are 2 questions in 1:
a) how to move out of the mass rom mode
b) How to reinstall the Uboot in my Pinephone Pro

Thank you.

I have 2 pinebook pros which we will call PBA (which contains EMMCA_A) and PBB (which contains EMMC_B). 

-PBA has had the keyboard replace and PBB has gotten the screen replaced. 
-PBB did not want to boot properly after getting a new screen.
-I troubleshot the problem by swapping EMMC_B into PBA for testing. EMMC_B fired up and booted.  I tried EMMC_A in PBB and got a proper boot after pressing the reset button. 
-I swapped both EMMC back to original position. PBB needed to have the reset button pressed but booted EMMC_B just fine after that.

~2 weeks later

-PBB needs a reinstall of the OS on EMMC_B
-used USB/EMMC adapter to reflash the OS and now EMMC_B is no longer bootable on PBB, but works fine in PBA
-EMMC_A boots from PBB if the reset button is pressed. EMMC_B will NOT boot in PBB no matter how many times I press the reset button, but works fine in PBA
- I decided on a permanent EMMC swap to save myself some work.  EMMC_A flashed with new image and placed into PBB will no longer work. Even after pressing the reset button.  Now I cannot boot either EMMC from PBB (which is presumably still in good working order.)

I have a couple more troubleshooting tricks up my sleeve, but I am running out of ideas on this one and would like to know what the community thinks. PBA has the nvme adapter so I can use the manjaro-arm-flasher to flash the EMMC and see if that helps.  Perhaps setting up the OS completely on PBA and then swapping to PBB might do the trick? Could the set up be causing the trouble?  I also havent tried booting from SD or distros other than Manjaro, but I will try that stuff as I move through this issue.

In the last 2 articles we built a Display Driver for PinePhone’s MIPI Display Serial Interface…

-  “Understanding PinePhone’s Display (MIPI DSI)”

-  “NuttX RTOS for PinePhone: Display Driver in Zig”

But our PinePhone Display Driver isn’t complete… It won’t render any graphics!

Today we’ll learn about the missing bits in our Display Driver…

-  What’s the Display Engine (DE) inside PinePhone

-  How the Timing Controller (TCON0) controls PinePhone’s LCD Display

-  How we call DE and TCON0 to render graphics

-  How our new PinePhone Display Driver will support DE and TCON0


Check out the article here...

Rendering PinePhone's Display (DE and TCON0)

chatty 0.7.0~rc0-1 made its way into bookworm about Oct 26 but is not usable - the bottom of the window hides behind the keyboard so you can't see what you're typing, nor the message to which you are responding.  If that matters to you, hold-off on upgrades until that is resolved (or do an apt-mark hold chatty beforehand?)

I restarted my installation of Mobian on the SD card in the PinePhone Pro. It works well after a dist-upgrade on October 28, 2022.

But I changed the screen magnification in gnome settings, which resulted in gnome settings crashing on its startup. The solution is to delete the binary format file, ~/.config/dconf/user .

I wanted to post the steps to installing Tow-Boot on the SPI.

Sorry if this is long and drawn out but I am writing this to help anyone new to Linux. With Manjaro being preinstalled from the factory it was best to write this using Manjaro specifics. I tried following the guides on the Tow-Boot website, Pine Wiki and the Manjaro Wiki but was unsuccessful. I would suggest reading these to conceptually understand what you are doing if you are new. You will need mtd-utils installed first for this to work. Now I would download the release you need and extract the file into a folder. I was not successful in getting the spi.installer.img to boot after flashing to a SD card to install using the directions provided in the reference section.

I used the method below under coding and it only took me about 3 minutes to accomplish this task.

I did all this on Manjaro but to my understanding other distributions should work the same.

References:
https://tow-boot.org/devices/pine64-pinebookPro.html
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pr...ash_device
https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Manja...ptional.29

Required Dependencies:
mtd-utils - https://software.manjaro.org/package/mtd-utils

Download Tow-Boot file:
https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/releases
(I installed pine64-pinebookPro-2021.10-005.tar.xz - https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/rel...005.tar.xz)

Code:
Step 1. I opened the terminal and "cd"d my way into the correct location to find the file "Tow-Boot.spi.bin" or depending on the distribution you are using you can also find the file, right click and got to "Open Terminal Here" - For this install it was located under the binaries folder.

Step 2. 

I recently got a PineBook Pro and wanted to try a different OS.  I downloaded and flashed Armbian and TwisterOS images to micro SD cards, but I cannot boot from them.  When I power on the PB with the micro SD card inserted, the screen is blank and the power light blinks about once per second.  Is there something else I need to do to?  I feel like there's something obvious I am missing.

Hello,

my Mobian-PinePhone has a new and very serious issue since a few days :
After a reboot the modem (sms, calling, mobile data) works for a while, but soon (after the phone goes to sleep I guess?) the modem completely stops working.
Very strange: It is still visible in the phosh top bar (with signal strength, settings and in modem manager! It's not 'gone', it's just not working/doing anything.

Never read anything about this specific problem.
Do you think this is a hardware or a Mobian issue?

Best Regards,
dante404

I have been unable to get the hardware to detect the module since march, possibly could it be the firmware or the board bad? I have a 3gb Convergence model

Since a few weeks I have problems again with call audio in Mobian. I don't use my PPP for calls often so I cannot say when the problem started.

In the settings app the sound test works fine in the "Default" configuration but fails to play any sound when set to "Phone call".

I have flashed the current weekly image and had the same problem there. So no funny configs on my side I guess.
Also I tried restarting pulseaudio, pipewire etc. as was mentioned in other threads.