At Wit's End

[jasonumd]

Hi everyone. Bought a PBP a couple of months ago that because useless out of the box. First it arrived with a broken screen. Was sent a replacement and got it booted. Performed updates and had the black screen issue. Failed at fixing that for some time. Recently tried to get Kali on it which would be extremely useful for me. I have it booting from the SD. But it looks like I deleted a partition from my eMMC and I can't figure anything out. I'm fairly tech savy but I just can't wrap my head around getting the eMMC built back up. Is there a guide available for zeroing out the eMMC and starting from scratch? I'd appreciate any help. I have scoured the forums and tried various things but haven't been successful and/or haven't found what I needed. It'll probably just go in a drawer until I decide to get rid of it unless I can find this help.

Thanks so much for any guidance you can provide.

[tophneal]

you can clear out the existing emmc content from your kali sd by using terminal or disk utility, gparted, etc.

what do you want to put onto your emmc? excluding OS options that have sd-to-emmc imgs, most imgs can be written directly to the emmc. so you could feasibly put a copy of the kali img (just using it as an example) onto your sd kali, as a downloaded file, open disks, erase the emmc, then restore the kali img to the emmc after. then you should be able to reboot/shutdown, pop out the sd, and boot into your new os on the emmc.

[diederik]

I'm fairly tech savy

Please provide as much technical info as you can, including the exact commands you used and if there are error messages, share them exactly.

[jasonumd]

I don't recall the exact sequence of commands I performed but what I can say now is that I have a completely unallocated eMMC. I have the USB eMMC adapter and I am now searching the proper partitions to create to rebuild the bootloader. I will reply again with specific commands and issues I encounter as I go through this process. Thank you both for your replies.

[TRS-80]

Yeah most images should include whatever is needed already. Having said that, I took the advice to install Tow-Boot to the SPI. It was a pretty easy process and I figure it gives me a lot of flexibility when testing new images, and/or recovery situations, etc. in the future.

[tophneal]

I don't recall the exact sequence of commands I performed but what I can say now is that I have a completely unallocated eMMC. I have the USB eMMC adapter and I am now searching the proper partitions to create to rebuild the bootloader. I will reply again with specific commands and issues I encounter as I go through this process. Thank you both for your replies.

it'll probably be easier to rewrite the bootloader (uboot) to the emmc than try to repair it. After grabbing the files, you can write it with these commands:

sudo dd if=/boot/idbloader.img of=/dev/mmcblkX seek=64 conv=notrunc,fsync

sudo dd if=/boot/u-boot.itb of=/dev/mmcblkX seek=16384 conv=notrunc,fsync

Remember to check and enter the right mmcblkX to match what mmblc shows for your emmc. You should be able to perform these commands from your kali SD live install.