Just purchased a used PBP (with no eMMC!) - any tips for a new user?

[pinemouth]

Thank you everyone! I have the laptop now and flashed Manjaro-ARM from the wiki to an SD card. It will not boot into an OS.

I opened it up and flipped off the eMMC hardware switch, to no avail.

I might try to flash a different image, or boot from a USB stick. Just wondering if these are common errors:

It runs autoboot and then reports multiple error messages such as:

Code:

Device 0: unknown device
switch to partitions #0, OK
mmc1 is current device
** NO partition table - mmc 1  **
Couldn't find partition mmc 1:1
Card did not respond to voltage select! -110
rockchip_pcie pcie@f80000000: PCIe link training gen1 timeout!

missing environment variable bootfile

Retrieving file: pxelinux.cfg/000000
No ethernet found.


SF: Detected gd25q128 with page size 256 Bytes, erase size 4 KiB, total 16 MiB
dhcp - boot image via network using DHCP/TFTP protocol

## Executing script at 05000000
Wrong image format for "source" command
SCRIPT FAILED: continuing...
=>

It attempts "Retrieving file" multiple times so I plugged in an ethernet to USB adapter, but it still didn't find ethernet.

I'm not sure what commands I can run at that prompt.

[pinemouth]

Update (my previous comment has not been approved yet so I'm adding info here)

Manjaro-ARM seems to boot from a USB stick. It's pretty slow, but I've got a splash screen at least. And only the right USB port seems to be recognized.

I had to keep the SD card in the slot for it to boot at all. Otherwise the screen and power LED wouldn't turn on at all. So the SD card won't boot without the above errors; the USB stick won't boot it at all; but the SD card inserted and the USB stick inserted (both flashed with the same image) seem to allow the USB stick to boot.

[tophneal]

NVMe would be the best option.
Although I have seen reports that only NVMe drives that use limited power (wattage) work properly in the PBP.
And I'm not sure what you have to do exactly to boot directly from NVMe.

That is correct, too much power draw from the nvme drive can cause problems like the PBP not booting up. that's one reason why we started a wiki page to catalog known, working-in-the-pbp nvme drives: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pr...SSD_drives

to boot from nvme, you just need a uboot (or levinboot) with nvme boot support in it. it can live on emmc, sd, or spi. if kept on emmc or sd, you'll want to avoid installing any OSes to that same drive, or the uboot boot priority may choose to run it instead of the nvme install. here's an older guide someone put together: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=11864

[wdt]

Seems pretty clear to me
----
mmc1 is current device
** NO partition table - mmc 1 **
Couldn't find partition mmc 1:1
Card did not respond to voltage select! -110
----
mmc1 is sd card, uboot is complaining that it can't read it
This is somewhat typical of manjaro's crappy mainline uboot
If the card is NOT high quality, get another card, this is important when running OS from sd card
Or,, on another linux box, download a BSP uboot, manjaro's will do,
rip apart the package and manually write idbloader, uboot and trust to correct places on sd
Best practice is blank 1st 16M first (/dev/zero), backup mbr first or make a note of the sectors (before blanking)
The behavior re usb boot is exactly as expected
----
Note: uboot MUST match the device, ie rk3399 pinebookpro, a uboot for any other device will NOT work

[pinemouth]

Just an update, it was the SD card. It was a brand new Sandisk A1 card. I am now using .... another Sandisk A1 card I pulled from a different device. I flashed Manjaro-arm on it and it booted up and is working fine.

I had tried two other SD cards too, which didn't work - but they were older Samsung SD cards. Maybe not fast enough for uboot to be happy with them. Who knows.

Thanks for reading, guys! I guess when it doubt, assume it's always the SD card until proven otherwise!

[wdt]

No, the later uboots seem rather 'fussy' about mmc timings,
a small window of acceptable
BSP uboots were/are more tolerant