PBP won't boot after trying to reinstall Manjaro ARM

[soupgirl]

Hi all,

The second time I turned on my PBP, it wouldn't boot (power status LED was flashing green/red).
I was able to boot to Armbian from microSD by disabling the eMMC, and tried to reinstall Manjaro ARM to the eMMC using this installer.
After putting in the settings for the install, it threw some errors about some nonexistent files in /var/tmp, and presumably went ahead writing to /dev/mmcblk1 (It said it was setting it up for ext4).  Half an hour of nothing happening, and I stopped it.
Now when I turn the device on, the light doesn't come on at all, whether the eMMC is disabled, or not.
I'm at a loss as to what to do at this point if I can't even boot to an SD card.  Apologies for the lack of foresight in taking pictures or noting the exact error messages.

Olivia

[Samurai_Crow]

It might be a version conflict in the UBoot firmware. (PinePhone has similar problems.)

[KC9UDX]

This is all too common.  Disable the eMMC, boot to microSD, enable the eMMC, and erase it.  There are numerous posts about this here.  Unfortunately they aren't easy to find.

Basically open the lid 90°, hang the display over the edge of a table, and take the bottom off.  Switch off the eMMC. Turn the power on.  If you have to move the PBP, only pick it up by the display half, and don't turn it right side up or pieces will fall out.  When booting has started, turn the eMMC back on and put the bottom back on. Then you can erase the eMMC and/or install the operating system of your choice, with an appropriate U-Boot or Tow-Boot.

[trillobite]

Hi all,

The second time I turned on my PBP, it wouldn't boot (power status LED was flashing green/red).
I was able to boot to Armbian from microSD by disabling the eMMC, and tried to reinstall Manjaro ARM to the eMMC using this installer.
After putting in the settings for the install, it threw some errors about some nonexistent files in /var/tmp, and presumably went ahead writing to /dev/mmcblk1 (It said it was setting it up for ext4).  Half an hour of nothing happening, and I stopped it.
Now when I turn the device on, the light doesn't come on at all, whether the eMMC is disabled, or not.
I'm at a loss as to what to do at this point if I can't even boot to an SD card.  Apologies for the lack of foresight in taking pictures or noting the exact error messages.

Olivia

I know this might sound weird but... If I run my pinebook until the battery is dead, and try to boot it before the battery has stored up enough juice, it will either flash green/red no boot, or sit with a steady green light, no boot. I just leave it on the barrel connector charger for about 10min, and it boots fine 99% of the time. I have had some incredibly strange symptoms happen with my pinebook when the battery is low and I am doing heavy processing (such as an os install would).

If your battery is charged up, you have a green light, but not boot... my guess is the flash to the emmc was bad, just try again.

I have also experienced r/w issues from the internal sd card slot, that eventually went away on it's own strangely. (OS updates? I don't know).

Personally I use the emmc writer... You do have to take the back off the pinebook, and the backplate can be annoying to reinstall again... but a reliably good flash keeps the headaches away!