PBP won’t boot from eMMC after Debian update / Tow-Boot installer won’t boot from SD

[Pino64]

I decided to cut my losses and do a fresh install.



I downloaded 'partition.img,gz' and 'firmware.pinebook-pro-rk3399.img.gz' from http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/installer-arm64/current/images/netboot/SD-card-images/ and combined them with

Code:

zcat ~/firmware.pinebook-pro-rk3399.img.gz ~/partition.img.gz > ~/complete_image.img

I used Disk Image Writer to write the resulting image to SD.




The PBP/Tow-Boot boots the installer and I get to select Location, Language, Locale and Keyboard. The installer then probes the hardware and reports:

[!] Detect network hardware

Some of your hardware needs non-free firmware files to operate. The firmware can be loaded from removable media such as a USB stick or floppy. The missing firmware files are:

brcm/brcmfmac43456-sdio.pine64,pinebook-pro.bin
brcm/brcmfmac43456-sdio.bin

If you have such media available now, insert it, and continue.
Load missing firmware from removable media? [Yes/No]

Figuring I did something wrong I created a new installation SD but that didn,t solve the issue.




I searched online but couldn't find these files. On my no longer booting SD card with Debian 11 I found 2 brcm directories with the following files:

BCM4345C5.hcd
brcmfmac43456-sdio.clm_blob
brcmfmac43456-sdio.txt
nvram_ap6256.txt
brcmfmac43456-sdio.bin
brcmfmac43456-sdio.pine64,pinebook-pro.txt
fw_bcm43456c5_ag.bin

Notably there is no 'brcmfmac43456-sdio.pine64,pinebook-pro.bin' but there is a .txt file with the same name. I copied all these files to a USB thumb drive (EXT4). Running the installer again and answering 'Yes' to the 'Load missing firmware from removable media? , question only results in the installer repeating the question.


Does anyone have an idea what I might be doing wrong?




Trying to install Armbian 22.02 Focal XFCE from https://www.armbian.com/pinebook-pro/ ended with:

Support status: no support (unsupported userspace)

I tried 2 older versions from the archive but those ended in a black screen and green power LED similar to my earlier boot issues.




I've depleted my PP battery twice today downloading and extracting images and writing them to SD cards (without using the keyboard battery).   I'm more comfortable with Debian but to see if I can get anything running again on my PBP I will try Manjaro once the battery level is sufficient again..

[Pino64]

I have successfully installed Manjaro without any problems and am running it from eMMC now.

I'll mark this issue as solved: Disabling the eMMC allowed Tow-Boot to install from SD. With the right operating system I was then able to boot from both SD and eMMC again.

I will open another thread for my problem installing Debian. Although I really like Manjaro, I am more comfortable with Debian/Ubuntu and because I spend more time travelling than at home I really need full disk encryption. Losing my iPad last week really drove that point home..

Thanks tophneal and wdt for your help!