Broken Boot

[wdt]

Something you could try, with balena
Write the image to an USB stick (make sure stick has nothing on it that you care about)
Check stick with fdisk, 1st part should be 32768 or 62500 sectors in
Stick should be generally readable
OR
xzcat xz_image |dd of=/dev/mmcblkX bs=1M status=progress
----
My experience with armbian is 50-50 viz bootability
try original mrfixit, quite reliable
---
and, BTW, every time you put a non-bootable sd in (and try to boot)
it may need the 8s,,20s dance (with a new card in obviously, 'bad' card OUT)
With no media, you will get nothing, ever, will think device dead

[djhnsn]

Something you could try, with balena
Write the image to an USB stick (make sure stick has nothing on it that you care about)
Check stick with fdisk, 1st part should be 32768 or 62500 sectors in
Stick should be generally readable
OR
xzcat xz_image |dd of=/dev/mmcblkX bs=1M status=progress
----
My experience with armbian is 50-50 viz bootability
try original mrfixit, quite reliable
---
and, BTW, every time you put a non-bootable sd in (and try to boot)
it may need the 8s,,20s dance (with a new card in obviously, 'bad' card OUT)
With no media, you will get nothing, ever, will think device dead

Thanks. I flashed the manjaro image to a usb stick and it started at 62500, and was mounted with 2 partitions readable. 

I was looking in some other threads, and I found someone with a similar situation getting it to boot by flashing an image to emmc. Since the adapter is supposed to arrive tomorrow, I will leave it alone until then. I'll have a look at mrfixit if these other things don't work.

Edit: I decided not to wait, and flashed mrfixit onto a 64gig samsung evo select. It still did not boot. I did hold the powerbutton down until I counted to 27, since I have the back cover off, I also pressed the reset button.

[djhnsn]

I found this on the wiki. The way I read it, I need a uboot on the emmc (possibly spi flah as well), it is what defines the boot order. Even if booting from a micro sd. I don't have a uboot on the emmc, but I do have one on the nmve. I bet if I can somehow move the boot partition to the emmc , and edit extlinux.conf, it will work.



"At this time, the Pinebook Pro ships with a Manjaro + KDE build with uboot on the eMMC. Its boot order is: SD, USB, then eMMC.

(An update has been pushed for the older Debian + MATE build that improves compatibility with booting other OSs from an SD card. In order to update, fully charge the battery, establish an internet connection, click the update icon in the toolbar, and then reboot your Pinebook Pro. Please see this log for details.)

Please note that PCIe, the interface used for NVMe SSD on the Pinebook Pro, is not bootable on the RK3399 and therefore is not a part of the boot hierarchy. It is possible to run the desired OS from NVMe by pointing extlinux on the eMMC to rootfs on the SSD. This requires uboot, the Kernel image, DTB, and extlinux.conf in a /boot partition on the eMMC."

[wdt]

The rom on cpu boot order (to find idbloader & then uboot) is SPI, emmc, uSD, usb for emmc/SPI write
Once uboot is found, its' boot order is used, usually (varies) uSD, usb, network, nvme, emmc
An experiment for you,,, zero with fdisk a uSD (note numbers so you can restore),
NOT mrfixit because it hasn't had uboot updated, insert usb stick and uSD
Maybe the usb stick will boot
It is really odd that mrfixit did not work
Boot rom (on cpu) looks for signature of idbloader 64 sectors, raw read, no FS, in boot order
From that media, uboot is read (and ATF maybe) then uboot searches filesystems for extlinux or boot.scr,
in its' boot order
BTW, try with BOTH usb sockets, I seem to recall often only 1 works and not other, not consistently
Oh, don't try sd -> usb adapter, I've never had that work--- for booting
----
BTW, any uboot should make green light (manjaro=red,then grn) come on.. I assume you see this?

[KC9UDX]

Don't do anything with the SPI flash ROM at this point. You don't need it just yet. But you won't be able to directly boot to the NVME drive without it.

And don't worry about the eMMC until you can boot from micro SD. If you can't boot from micro SD, you can't boot from anything. It isn't unheard-of to have one or more micro SD cards just quit working with the PBP. I would try another card. Flash a bootable image to it, and you should get the power LED to turn on. This is done by software (U-boot). A dark power LED is a pretty good sign that U-boot is failing. U-boot exists in an unformatted partition at the start of your micro SD. This is why correct flashing is pertinent; and why sometimes just inserting such a card into another computer can corrupt your U-boot (operating systems don't know what to do with that unformatted partition and some might do any manner of things to it at any time).

[djhnsn]

I just removed the emmc, placed it into the usb adapter, flashed manjaro onto it, now everything works as expected again.