If you've messed up your eMMC Card - Solved

[Rocklobster]

Using SD Formatter have you set Size Adjustment to On

[gregb49]

Having decided that I quite like Armbian, in my attempts to find a good desktop OS, I also decided to put it on my eMMC card, which took me straight back to the problem I had before. The eMMC card appears as a 32mb card to both Xubuntu and Win10.

I tried both SD Formatter and DISKPART, but neither would register a card above 32mb neither would they format it or ‘clean’ it. Gparted would neither delete this 32mb partition nor create a new partition table, so I was stumped.

Once again I flashed Aufan’s image to an SD Card and using the pin shortening method, booted into bionic-lxde, with the eMMC installed onto the Rock64 board. It seems that the pin shorting method will only work on a newly flashed image. Gparted saw all the partitions on the eMMC so I deleted them, and created a new 64GB ext4 partition. Back to Xubuntu and Win10 for flashing Armbian onto the eMMC. Neither OS would see anything other than a 32mb partiton, despite all that I had just carried out.

I tried to go back and use the

Code:

/usr/local/bin/rock64_reset_emmc.sh

emmc reset trick, but suddenly I could no longer boot into the SD Card with the eMMC installed, no matter what distro I used. The two pin shorting out trick no longer worked, for some reason. I tried deleting the SP1 flash, but this made no difference either.

If I could have gone to a local shop to buy an eMMC card, I would have done so.

If anyone else ends up in this predicament, I don’t know what they should do. I was in the good position of owning an Odroid XU4 so using the eMMC recovery utility,
Odroid eMMC recovery
I installed Odroid Android. After doing this and running it on the Odroid, I was able to use Etcher and load Armbian onto my eMMC Card. It is booting and running fine.

All this took me most of the day. Surely there is a better way. isn’t there, to recover an eMMC Card? The Rock 64 4GB has so much promise as a desktop computer, but maybe it is just early days, or is it just me that struggles?