This is how you flash to eMMC easily

[RMJ250]

Is there a special way to power on the device once the SD card is in?

I dd'ed an SD card with the jumpboot image but when I try to power on with the power button, it does nothing... No power on at all.

If I just stick in an SD card and boot it up, I can see the device in fdisk -l.

Thoughts?
Joe

Hi, did you fix this? I can boot from an SDcard with either Mobian and UBports but it won't even start with Jumpdrive

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Is there a special way to power on the device once the SD card is in?

I dd'ed an SD card with the jumpboot image but when I try to power on with the power button, it does nothing... No power on at all.

If I just stick in an SD card and boot it up, I can see the device in fdisk -l.

Thoughts?
Joe

Hi, did you fix this? I can boot from an SDcard with either Mobian and UBports but it won't even start with Jumpdrive

ok, my Pinephone wouldn't boot when I had used Balena on Windows to flash the SDcard but it did when I used dd to copy Jumpdrive using a Debian system

[mw4jet]

I flashed jump drive to an SD card with BalenaEtcher on Windows 10. It works fine. I am not comfortable with terminal yet.... After booting jump drive and connecting the phone it shows six files on the eMMC:

boot
image(zipped)
initramfs(zipped)
and 3 "sun50i-a64-pinephone- 1.*.dtb" files.

Do I delete them all and flash just the Mobian image with BalenaEtcher?

Another question - if I later want to restore the PostmarketOS to the eMMC as original, can I just paste those files back or do they need to be flashed with BalenaEtcher? And how would multiple files be flashed?

Got it. Found a good video

[xalius]

I flashed jump drive to an SD card with BalenaEtcher on Windows 10. It works fine. I am not comfortable with terminal yet.... After booting jump drive and connecting the phone it shows six files on the eMMC:

boot
image(zipped)
initramfs(zipped)
and 3 "sun50i-a64-pinephone- 1.*.dtb" files.

Do I delete them all and flash just the Mobian image with BalenaEtcher?

Another question - if I later want to restore the PostmarketOS to the eMMC as original, can I just paste those files back or do they need to be flashed with BalenaEtcher? And how would multiple files be flashed?

Got it. Found a good video

What you are seeing under windows is just the /boot partition of the image/card since that is in FAT format, there are other partitions that contain the acutal rootfs which Windows can't see. When you write an image with dd or etcher it overwrites the whole system so you don't have to mess with files.

[Basic]

Luke, et. al.,

"Here's how it works:
1) download the Jumpdrive image
2) flash the Jumpdrive image to a SD card
3) boot from the SD card
4) connect the PinePhone to your computer using USB-A -> USB-C cable.
5) flash the exposed (mounted) PinePhone drive with a chosen OS image as you'd flash any SD card
6) once the flashing process is complete, disconnect the PinePhone from your PC, power it down and remove the Jumpdrive SD card
7) boot into your OS of choice on eMMC"


OK I was using Trisquel ( version 7) and I could not power down the phone with the Jump drive SD in...can any of that cause issues? 

I had issues with the phone out of the box BTW, KDE plasma had no "x" to close applications...Mobian has similar issues in that you cant swipe out.

Edited to add: I used Trisquel 9 to flash ARCH. The phone worked for a while, then overnight the phone locked up on the login screen, WiFi dip switch was in the "Off" position.

I am having issues updating my support ticket with deskai.zoho.com.

[dawg161]

Jumpdrive is great, and I’d like to suggest another use for it: backup. After you tinker with the Pinephone for a while, you probably get it in a state you really like and then you are discouraged from messing with it further because you don’t want to break a good thing. But with jumpdrive, you can use gnome-disks to make an image of your eMMC, giving you a very simple restore to the state you want it. It’s also helpful if you lock yourself out of the phone, you can take the image, mount it, make adjustments, and flash it back. I’d recommend anyone who has gotten a good setup do this

[Old_Mil]

Hello everyone,

We now have a utility to flash eMMC. Many thanks go out to @MartijnBraam @Danct12 and others who contributed to making this happen.


Here's how it works:
1) download the Jumpdrive image
2) flash the Jumpdrive image to a SD card
3) boot from the SD card
4) connect the PinePhone to your computer using USB-A -> USB-C cable.
5) flash the exposed (mounted) PinePhone drive with a chosen OS image as you'd flash any SD card
6) once the flashing process is complete, disconnect the PinePhone from your PC, power it down and remove the Jumpdrive SD card
7) boot into your OS of choice on eMMC

Thanks to everyone who put this together.  I downloaded the Mobian/Posh beta and installed it to the using this procedure and the built in Disks utility in Mint to flash both Jumpdrive to the 4gb MicroSD I used to boot the Pinephone Beta (3gb) and then to eMMC.

No issues at all with the reflash and the end result is far faster and more usable than Manjaro/KDE.

[nelstomlinson]

It worked! I have backed up my slightly-borked manjaro install and installed mobian in its place. It took quite a while to transfer many gigbytes, so I learned to use the status=progress option on dd:

sudo dd status=progress bs=1M if=~/Pinephone/20210730.img of=/dev/sdc

My thanks to the people who developed this jumpdrive utility.

[HobanWashburn]

I just used jumpdrive from megi's boot along with balina etcher.

[cabbie001]

Very good job. It can flash images, resize and operate with eMMC all from the computer.

Thank you.

Yes, the jumpdrive is the way to go imho.
But as lodopidolo mentions, RESIZE is also a step which needs to be mentioned more explicitly.
After you flash the chosen OS image to the eMMC drive, remove the jumpdrive and reboot, the resulting system is only using a fraction of the available space (usually around 5G of the available 29-30G. So I have been going back in a second time with the jumpdrive, to resize the 2nd partition on eMMC using parted from a terminal on my PC.
In my case:
   sudo parted /dev/<your_sd_card_device>
   (parted) resizepart 2 100%
   (parted) quit

If you run lsblk before & after doing this, you'll see the partition usage on /dev/sdc (or whichever drive letter applies in your case) jump from 5 up to 29G or so.
Rebooting to the eMMC after that will give full access to the available space, which should improve performance.

[susy1075]

Hello I am new to Linux and I was wondering if someone could give me step by step instructions on how to flash my sd card from my actual pine phone itself… since I don’t have a pc/laptop.

Someone on pine64 web irc gave me commands to do this but it didn’t go through….

Thank you

PS. Right now I can’t use the internet and my phone calls are just static…. Also the font size changed by itself… It is so small I can barely read it, and there is no option to change it…….