Bricked PBP after writing image to eMMC?

[binholz]

So, now have un-bricked my PinebookPro and write this from my new Debian versin from the emmc.

My situation was this:
- emmc was turned off on the board (see wiki)
- SD card did boot

So now to get the emmc back again.

Prep:
- Set a shortcut in your desktop environment to easily start a terminal. (see below)
- Get a tiny pin to switch the emmc back on, ideally isolated.
- Put your boot SD card in

1. Unscrew the 10 screws at the back. You need a tiny screw driver for that, don't force it. then gently remove the bottom part of the PBP cover.
2. There are some medium loose bits inside, so don't turn it back. (see wiki for the screw fixture for example, also the loudspeaker can move when open)
3. The Wiki mentions not to open the display, however to turn it you have to open the display a bit. I did not open it fully, more like a 70 degrees angle. Be careful.
4. now the first tricky bit. You have to turn on the PBP. As the PBP is upside down check where the powerbutton is. Then bring your pin into position on the emmc switch.
5. Turn the PBP on. Wait two seconds (you practice with the stopwatch in your smartphone a bit to get that right).
6. The PBP schould now boot without problems from the SD card. But has the kernel found the emmc ?
7. As you have to operate the PBP upside down you use your shortcut to open a teminal. Then use command `lsblk` to see which drives are found. There should be two main devices called mmcblkX (X can vary). your emmc is the one without the root mount. In my case this worked in the first try, however if the timing in step 5 is not quite right you might have to repeat this. From there.
8. With the emmc active I have now closed my laptop and screwed the bottom back on. 
9. Open the PBP normally (not upside down)
10 Download a PBP image. I have used the standard Debian release. links in the wiki
11. unpack the downloaded image file and dd it to the emmc (instructions in the wiki)
12. reboot. done

It probably sounds more complicated than it is. Use common sense and don't apply pressure on the PBP.

This worked for me, well i didn't follow you 100%.  but i got it booted with the emmc recognized after flipping the switch after boot.  I got Kali installed on the emmc finally.  

this problem started when i resized my root partition after flashing it, i got a red light and it would sit there for a long time.

it would boot without resize, but that is not what i wanted and it doesn't resize on first boot.  the new Kali images are setup as one partition and not 2 like the manjaro setup.  I'm assuming this is why i had some problems with booting after resizing.  so i took a look at the Kali arm build scripts to see how they set the image to boot for the pinebook pro. 

these are the commands i used to make the drive bootable again, just note i did this for both the SD and EMMC

- expand partition on SD card, run cmd bellow from ${MNT}/boot
- after a successful boot I dd'ed the SD to the emmc and resized it to the max (120GB ish) and ran the cmds bellow again
-*- i used the flip switch trick from Surehand53 above < Thanks, it made my day! 

Code:

mkimage -A arm -O linux -T script -C none -n "U-Boot boot script" -d boot.txt boot.scr
dd if=idbloader.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 seek=64 conv=notrunc
dd if=u-boot.itb of=/dev/mmcblk2 seek=16384 conv=notrunc

Now i have a working Kali install on both the SD and EMMC, don't need the SD anymore though.

Thanks to everyone else for your input and experiences with this issue, have a good one.