trouble flashing eMMC

[TylerBlackberry]

I have trouble getting pine phone pro to boot after flashing the eMMC.  I am using towboot.

Using the published instructions below from the wiki, I boot from the SD card using Kali.   Downloaded a two images Mobian and Ubuntu touch .  used dd without issue while booted from SD card.

On reboot, it fails to boot. Tried both Mobian and Ubuntu touch images. I did extract to the .img file and not flashing the .xz or the .gz version of the image.

OS

1. Flash an OS to the microSD card (and optionally resize the partition, see below)
   
2. Insert microSD card and boot the phone
   
3. Download the desired OS' image on the booted OS or transfer it to the microSD card
   
4. Extract the image file if it is archived
   
5. Flash the image file to eMMC using 
   
   
   Code:

   dd if=IMAGE.img of=/dev/mmcblkX bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync

[TylerBlackberry]

I was able to flash the manjaro image so the process does work.  Must be those images for Mobian and Ubuntu

[mikehenson]

I made a video on flashing the eMMC on a PinePhone Pro with Towboot.

https://youtu.be/FBGVUq3DGK4

[Kevin Kofler]

The most reliable way to flash the eMMC is indeed to use:

• on the PinePhone pro, the USB Mass Storage (jump drive) mode of Tow-Boot ("The phone can be started in USB Mass Storage mode by holding the volume up button at startup before and during the second vibration. The LED will turn blue if done successfully. In this mode, the phone will work like a USB drive when connected to a host computer.") (as is mentioned on the video, though you cannot actually see it being done),
  
• on the original (A64) PinePhone, a MicroSD card with the dedicated JumpDrive image (download the image and dd it to an empty MicroSD card, or one whose data you do not need anymore, as all data on the MicroSD card will be overwritten and hence wiped by dd) that turns it into a USB mass storage device.
  

Then you can connect the phone to a computer using a USB C-A or C-C cable and flash it just like a USB stick or an SD card.

Flashing directly from a running image on a MicroSD card is not so safe because you will be copying a running system, unless you copy another image file into the dd'd image beforehand and use that as the dd source on the phone rather than the running system.