The Case of the Vanishing EMMC

[DieSkaarj]

Hi all,

Nice to meet you, however I must first apologise and that's not because I'm late to the party but that I'm having trouble with my PPP.

I was distro-hopping and destroied all the data on the EMMC. I had installed Towboot previously and could easily rewrite the device. When I try to get into Mask ROM mode (holding vol. up) the led goes blue for a very short period, as if entering the mode, before changing to red, flashing and while the phone pulses four times.

I can get the PPP into Mask ROM mode by holding RE, it's identified on the bus by lsusb but the device is no longer showing up when probed by 'blkid.' I've tried to boot from sd-card but it doesn't seem to recognise it, I recently replaced the sd-sim slot due to broken pins, so that could be on me.

Any help, guidance or just another opinion will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
David

[DieSkaarj]

The sd-card/sim slot wasn't attached properly. That has been fixed and I've reinstalled towboot. However I'm not out of the woods yet! I've tried postmarketOS, mobian and more recently manjaro (stable.) pmOS fails to boot as the /boot partition can't be found; Mobian gets a bit further and I get:

[1.403151] dw-apb-uart ff180000.serial: Failed to create device link (0x180) with 0-001c
[1.456703] dw-apb-uart ff180000.serial: Failed to create device link (0x180) with 0-001c
[1.475751] OF: graph: no port node found in /i2c@ff3d0000/typec-portc@22
[1.636224] mmc1: error -110 whilst initialising SD card
[1.804715] mmc1: error -110 whilst initialising SD card
[1.985690] mmc1: error -110 whilst initialising SD card
[2.199244] mmc1: error -110 whilst initialising SD card
[3.455033] pinephone-keyboard 5-0015: Failed to read device ID: -6

With manjaro I can get a shell and the emmc looks truly f0x0r3d.

[fxc]

The sd-card/sim slot wasn't attached properly. That has been fixed and I've reinstalled towboot. However I'm not out of the woods yet! I've tried postmarketOS, mobian and more recently manjaro (stable.) pmOS fails to boot as the /boot partition can't be found; Mobian gets a bit further and I get:

[1.403151] dw-apb-uart ff180000.serial: Failed to create device link (0x180) with 0-001c
[1.456703] dw-apb-uart ff180000.serial: Failed to create device link (0x180) with 0-001c
[1.475751] OF: graph: no port node found in /i2c@ff3d0000/typec-portc@22
[1.636224] mmc1: error -110 whilst initialising SD card
[1.804715] mmc1: error -110 whilst initialising SD card
[1.985690] mmc1: error -110 whilst initialising SD card
[2.199244] mmc1: error -110 whilst initialising SD card
[3.455033] pinephone-keyboard 5-0015: Failed to read device ID: -6

With manjaro I can get a shell and the emmc looks truly f0x0r3d.

Are you booting with RE or volume down? I'm asking because your above text is quite chaotic. For clarification:

* The RE buttons disables the eMMC and the SPI flash memory.
* Volume UP starts USB Mass Storage Mode (with Tow-Boot)
* Volume DOWN starts from microSD card (with Tow-Boot)

If you try to boot with RE it makes sense why it is not booting. RE disables the eMMC and SPI flash memory, however on the SPI there is Tow-Boot installed. Mobian and postmarketOS come with no bootloader and both need Tow-Boot. "MASKROM" means there is no valid OS found anywhere.

Only boot from microSD card with Volume DOWN.

[DieSkaarj]

Booting into MASK ROM: There is no led but on a secondary computer it is recognised on the bus. "Bus 003 Device 006: ID 2207:330c Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics Company RK3399 in Mask ROM mode"

With Volume UP: It starts to go into Mass Storage Mode, the led goes blue and then the phone pulses for four and resets, sometimes just vibrating until it is unpowered.

With Volume DOWN: It starts to boot the O/S. pmOS (both image and installer) halt because no boot partition is found; Mobian gives me the quoted read out; Manjaro gives me more errors, similar to Mobian, clearly related to the emmc (mmc1.) However, with Manjaro the led goes to a yellowish white vibrates for a while and then gives me an emergency shell.

Using blkid while in the em-shell gives me I/O errors on /dev/mmcblk1, as does fsck on both mmcblk1 & mmcblk2.

I originally used gparted to clear the emmc while the phone was in mass storage mode. I was troubleshooting the sdcard and was querying whether it was because there was an O/S already on the device. I have tried alternative sdcards and the same issue (described above) occurs.

[DieSkaarj]

From the em-shell, blkid returns:

[118.673009] mmcblk1: recovery failed!
[118.677141] I/O error, dev mmcblk1, sector 62333824 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x80700 phys_seg 1 prio class 2
[118.686600] mmcblk1: recovery failed!
[118.691000] I/O error, dev mmcblk1, sector 62333824 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x0 phys_seg 1 prio class 2
[118.700179] Buffer I/O error on dev mmcblk1, logical block 7791728, async page read
/dev/mmcblk2: PTUUID="[REDACTED]" PTTYPE="gpt"

[fxc]

Booting into MASK ROM: There is no led but on a secondary computer it is recognised on the bus. "Bus 003 Device 006: ID 2207:330c Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics Company RK3399 in Mask ROM mode"

With Volume UP: It starts to go into Mass Storage Mode, the led goes blue and then the phone pulses for four and resets, sometimes just vibrating until it is unpowered.

With Volume DOWN: It starts to boot the O/S. pmOS (both image and installer) halt because no boot partition is found; Mobian gives me the quoted read out; Manjaro gives me more errors, similar to Mobian, clearly related to the emmc (mmc1.) However, with Manjaro the led goes to a yellowish white vibrates for a while and then gives me an emergency shell.

Using blkid while in the em-shell gives me I/O errors on /dev/mmcblk1, as does fsck on both mmcblk1 & mmcblk2.

I originally used gparted to clear the emmc while the phone was in mass storage mode. I was troubleshooting the sdcard and was querying whether it was because there was an O/S already on the device. I have tried alternative sdcards and the same issue (described above) occurs.

Do you have a multimeter, which you can use to measure the battery voltage of your battery?

[DieSkaarj]

I do and it is reading 3.9V.

[fxc]

I do and it is reading 3.9V.

Battery not drained then. Might be either a bug with Tow-Boot or there is something wrong with the eMMC, however it wouldn't make sense why it's not booting from the microSD card in the first case.

I would suggest that you flash https://github.com/manjaro-pinephone/pla...610.img.xz to a microSD card and then you boot from the microSD card using ONLY the RE button underneath the back cover. No volume down or anything. Simply hold RE button at boot for a few seconds, long enough so that the eMMC (and SPI) gets skipped at boot. If that works we will know more.

[DieSkaarj]

It does not boot with that image either. I think it might actually be a faulty sd-sim slot. There is a horrible scraping sound when I put a card in that has persisted from when I first got it. I also reset the slot to ensure it had a good connection, to no avail. The emmc I damaged by using gparted to clear it. You live, you learn.

I think my best option at this time is to offer it up for spares and save for a new board.

Thank you sincerely for you help fxc.

[dchang0]

I don't think you can "damage" the eMMC by using GParted to wipe the partition table.

The fact that you can use dd to erase the bootloader portion of the eMMC and still write a new bootloader onto the eMMC indicates you have quite a lot of leeway as to what you can do with the eMMC and still recover.

Re: [1.636224] mmc1: error -110 whilst initialising SD card

This does make me suspect that your microSD+SIM card slot is broken. If you are trying to boot from or install from microSD, that might never work as long as the microSD card slot is untrustworthy.

Are you able to put the eMMC into USB mode so that you can write an image directly to it? If so, my recommendation is to bypass the microSD card slot. Put the PPP's eMMC into USB disk mode, attach it directly to a LINUX computer, use the LINUX computer to write an OS image directly to the eMMC (I recommend the Mobian image, as this is exactly what I did myself).

Also, if you hold the RE button down for too long while booting, it will effectively completely disable the eMMC (make it inaccessible to the OS that you are booting from the microSD). Hold the RE button down only past the first single vibration (LED should be RED) and let go of the RE button before the double vibrations (LED should turn yellow).