Wouldn't boot from SD, now won't even power on

[thistof]

That's basically it. I tried putting postmarket/phosh on an SD card, and it just kept booting directly into manjaro. I got a new SD card in case the old one was faulty. Same thing. Tried again with jumpdrive. Then suddenly the phone won't even power on at all. No LED, no vibration, nothing. Trying to find the next step to at least unbrick this thing.

[kqlnut]

Has it worked before with one of the SD cards? If not, are you sure the SD card is in the right slot? Is the battery fine? Does anything happen when you plug in the charger (without an SD card inserted)?

[Merc]

I've had this happen a few times and every time I've solved it by holding down the "RESET" button on the back of the phone, you'll have to remove the back cover. Even when the phone shows no sign of life by holding the power button, holding the reset down for 10 seconds then using the power button has worked. Give it a try.

And to the matter of your phone not booting from the SD card, you have to remember that you need to flash the .img file and in most cases the .img file is compressed into a .img.xz file which when you flash it like that will not work. Try using xzcat and piping it into dd. As an example:

Code:

xzcat 20211003-0309-postmarketOS-v21.06-phosh-10-pine64-pinephone.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/[SDCARD] status=progress conv=fsync

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/NOOB

[thistof]

I figured it out!

Thanks for all the tips. I had tried those suggestions before my original post, but I tried them again and a few other things.

In the end I tried flashing the sd card from a different computer with built-in sd card slot. After that, everything worked as expected and the phone booted from the SD right away and installation resumed no problem. It seems the usb card reader I was using was the issue, though it seemed to be working correctly, somehow the image was corrupted during the flashing or ejecting of the card.

[bcnaz]

OR use Balena Etcher.

1) Download desired image to your downloads file.

2) Open Balena Etcher, > go to downloads > pick the desired image, and click on 'open'
next chose your sd card as 'target' > then click 'flash'..... grab a drink and wait for Balena Etcher to finish the job.

I started using Balena Etcher when I got my first Pinebook Pro.
Since I started playing with the Pine phones, I have done hundreds of sd card flashes successfully.

[thistof]

Thanks, I did use Balena Etcher on both computers. Seems pretty reliable.