This is how you flash to eMMC easily

[zetabeta]

--

… since I don’t have a pc/laptop.

i think you have a .... big issue. you probably need some kind of other device, although android is not good.

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…….

assuming you have memory card, which is big enough, i think at least 8GB. you could flash operating system to the memory card instead of internal eMMC. and maybe after that install into internal card (again).

maybe question is what you have there.

you probably have manjaro plasma mobile?

do you have manjaro image file in the pinephone? hint: https://github.com/manjaro-pinephone/pho...tag/beta17 , manjaro phosh is one option of many.

do you have memory cards, and what sizes?

i don't know all the details, i cannot be super specific but i think command is something like this in pinephone o.s..
$ sudo dd bs=1M if={filename} of=/dev/mmcblk#
this command is dangerous! and it may seriously destroy the running o.s., so you need know which memory booted. /dev/mmcblk0 would be for external card, /dev/mmcblk2 for internal card. {filename} needs to be image file, xz (or other compressions) need to be unpacked. usually .img.xz > .img

alternatively if possible, try to use computer and install o.s. directly to memory card and then insert mem card into pinephone. this does not need jumpdrive. image files needs to be installed to the whole memory card, not to the partitions or inside filesystems.

[nelstomlinson]

Something isn't right: I have booted up jumpdrive, and I'm trying to use dd to restore a backup I made earlier with jumpdrive. dd starts out copying FAST, but after 10 minutes or so it hangs up, at around 10 to 20GB. Even after waiting 5 hours, it doesn't finish, and I don't have a bootable image on the eMMC.

Any idea what's causing the hangup?

To make the backup image:

Code:

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

makes a 31.3GB disk image.

To restore it:

Code:

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

Oddly enough, the 6GB weekly image from 12 December flashes to the sMMC just fine, never hangs.
I'm running Release Linux Mint 19.2 Tina 64-bit
Kernel Linux 5.4.0-90-generic x86_64

[Zebulon Walton]

Sounds like bufferbloat at work.  (Data quickly fills buffers then I/O slows down writing to the slow physical device.) However that shouldn't cause your restore to take over 5 hours.

I add "conv=fsync" to the dd command line to make sure data is flushed to the device before dd exits. When using a large buffer this can also help catch errors that might otherwise go unreported:

https://abbbi.github.io/dd/

As an aside, to save some disk space I pipe the image backup through gzip. If the pinephone is /dev/sdc this would be:

Code:

dd if=/dev/sdc bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync | gzip -c >pinephone.img.gz

To restore:

Code:

gunzip -c pinephone.img.gz | dd of=/dev/sdc bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync

[nelstomlinson]

Thanks, Zebulon. That's helpful info.

Looking in my system info list of processes while dd is hung up I see a bunch of i/o-looking processes whose status is sleeping or waiting. I suspect that the phone just stops responding after a while. With jumpdrive running there doesn't seem to be any way to interact with the phone except as a disk drive.

[wibble]

I don't know if it's still there, but JumpDrive used to provide a network interface that you could telnet to as well as the mass storage devices. Using that you should be able to find out what's freezing.

[flynx]

When I boot my pinephone into jumpdrive and attempt to use dd to read or write the emmc image, the phone will spontaneously reboot after a few hundred megs have copied, long before the operation is finished. That shouldn't be happening right? How can I keep the phone from rebooting so the dd operation isn't interrupted?

[groomsb31]

Configure the boot switch to boot from SD Card as described in Boot Configurations. Power on the board and boot into Linux.
Flash <YOCTO_IMAGE>-<YOCTO MACHINE>. sdcard from the SD card to eMMC. This will partition the card and copy U-Boot, zImage, dtb, and root filesystem to eMMC.

[gregb49]

Having just taken delivery of a pinephone and found Manjaro unusable, I tried UBPorts on an SD card (ubuntu-touch-pinephone.img.xz) which worked well and simply. Thus I wanted to put it on the eMMC, but was put off by all the DD-ing and other software required, typed in from my screen. So, reading that you could access the eMMC memory by switching on the pinephone and holding volume up simultaneously, I did that.

- Then I connected my pinephone to a linux computer, and with trepidation, I used Gparted to clear all the partitions from the eMMC as if it was just an SD card.
-Next, with Gparted, I created a Partition Table, then a new Win 32 partition.
- Then I used the Raspberry Pi Imager software to write the UBPorts .img to the eMMC. It appeared to work just like Imager does with an SD Card. 
- Having "Ejected" the eMMC, from the Linux computer, I then started the Pinephone and to my great relief, it worked just as my old UBPorts phone, if not better.

Is this a safe method, or not recommended for some reason?

[_radv_]

@gregb49 where did you read you could "access eMMC memory by switching on and holding volume up"?  I recently got this device and am looking for all the informational resources I can find.  I'm in preliminary stages; haddn't read about that, yet.

[fxc]

@gregb49 where did you read you could "access eMMC memory by switching on and holding volume up"?  I recently got this device and am looking for all the informational resources I can find.  I'm in preliminary stages; haddn't read about that, yet.

That only applies to Tow-Boot. Tow-Boot has an USB Mass Storage mode, which is booted with the volume key.

For the regular PinePhone I would suggest that you flash the eMMC as explained under https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_I...structions