charging indicator

[nristen]

Update:

I followed the new additional instructions added on the wiki: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_P...structions

located in the section in blue beginning with:
If the battery is fully drained U-Boot might fail...

After letting it charge for about 6 hours, I am now getting a response however it still fails to fully boot.

After hitting the power button for two seconds to turn it on, a spinning indicator comes on for about 2 seconds then it goes to a blank screen with a tiny pointer that I can move around the screen by touching the display.  If I hit the power button again it goes back to the spinning icon for a few seconds before the screen goes black.

I am wondering if the boot failure is the result of the failure to update the system when I first got the phone when I tried to update using the discover app and then tried using pacman -Syu.

Does anyone else have any knowledge of what the black screen with the tiny pointer indicates?

I have also tried to boot with an sd card by holding down the power button for 5 - 8 seconds but I get the same results.

If the boot is broken on your eMMC,   perhaps the sd card will boot with the short 2 second power button press ?

Just a thought.

---

Curious :  what OS did you put on your sd card ?

I have tried the SD card with Manjaro ARM plasma for pinephone pro (20220129 and 20220130) - I have been unable to get the phone to boot from either.  I have tried holding the power button down for 5 to 6 seconds and holding down the reset button while hitting the power button.

I have ordered the serial to USB cable and the external battery charger but expect those to take several weeks to arrive.

I will also probably try to make a video showing what I have attempted to see if that provides any further insight into what I might be doing wrong.

[bcnaz]

are you certain your sd cards are working, --> bootable ?

I Quickly got frustrated with Plasma, So I put in an sd card with Mobian Pro flashed to it.

Then started the phone with a 6 second press to the Power button --> Mobian started right up.

[nristen]

are you certain your sd cards are working, --> bootable ?

I Quickly got frustrated with Plasma,  So I put in an sd card with Mobian Pro flashed to it.

Then started the phone with a 6 second press to the Power button  -->  Mobian started right up.

No, I am not certain the sd card is working.  I used a card that I had previously used on a raspberry pi.

I will try Mobian Pro.


update:
I copied mobian-pinephonepro-phosh-20220116.img to the sd card with the command, sudo dd if=mobian-pinephonepro-phosh-20220116.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync

output:

Code:

6000000000 bytes (6.0 GB, 5.6 GiB) copied, 94 s, 63.8 MB/s
5722+1 records in
5722+1 records out

Here is a picture of the screen that I get after booting by either hitting the power button once or holding it down for 10 seconds:

[bcnaz]

That arrow is something from the Plasma image ( I think )

I have only used etcher to flash my sd cards, so I cannot say if your dd command is correct or not.

[phelion]

Hi @nristen , sorry to hear you've been having trouble getting the SD Card images to boot - @bcnaz 's suggestion of using Balena Etcher is probably the best way to be sure that you've got the image on the SD Card: https://www.balena.io/etcher/

It's advised to be very careful when using dd as it is possible to write to a disk that you didn't intend to, so something like Etcher will make this much less likely!

An easy way to see how your disks are named is to use the Gnome Disks program as it will give you a visual representation of your disks and you can check what each ones are in '/dev/sdb' or '/dev/mmcbkl0' or '/dev/nvme0n1' terms where it says Size, Device, Contents.
(https://apps.gnome.org/en-GB/app/org.gnome.DiskUtility/)

On one of my laptops, inserting an SD Card will use the /dev/mmcbkl0 naming style, although I have another laptop that runs on an nvme drive (which shows up as /dev/nvme0n1) and inserting an SD Card in that one shows up as /dev/sda so checking with Gnome Disks is the easiest way to know for sure.

As far as my experiences go, when I first got the Pinephone Pro it wouldn't charge from the 2A charger I normally use, but after updating the software it is no longer quite so picky and will happily charge from that same charger without any problems.

If your pre-installed Manjaro Plasma update failed initially, it might still be a bit choosy about the power source for charging (and 'turning the phone off to charge' doesn't currently work as the phone will boot if plugged in to a charger - possible hardware/software/firmware issue) so try to make sure that the battery is charged up using the known good charger you used before and I'd recommend using Etcher to get the Mobian PinephonePro image onto the SD Card and see if that works better.

Let us know how you get on and hopefully it'll help someone else who experiences similar issues!

Kindest Regards,
phelion

[nristen]

I wanted to thank everyone for the suggestion to use Etcher for writing the image to the SD card.

When etcher was done writing the image, the verification stage failed indicating a problem with the SD card.

After I tried using another card, I was able to boot into Mobian successfully after inserting the SD card and holding the power button down for 6 seconds.

[phelion]

I wanted to thank everyone for the suggestion to use Etcher for writing the image to the SD card.

When etcher was done writing the image, the verification stage failed indicating a problem with the SD card.

After I tried using another card, I was able to boot into Mobian successfully after inserting the SD card and holding the power button down for 6 seconds.

Thanks @nristen for letting us know how you got on - I think it's really helpful to know all the different issues that people are experiencing and how they are resolved, so that if anyone else is having similar problems they might find some ideas about what to check.

I hadn't really thought about the SD Card being the issue but now hopefully someone else having troubles may think about trying another SD Card (or we can suggest it on the forums) and it's good to know that Etcher's verification stage helps highlight any possible SD Card issues!

Kindest Regards,
phelion