Trouble with my pinebook

[Kenzucky]

Hi,

My pinebook is not booting anymore. The screen remains dark after more than 10 trials to power off/on with the upper right button.

I think it is because I'm a pine64 and I installed updates for rock64 from Ayudan, and i should not have.

I also entered a command to reboot but it was set on 1 and I'm scared that it might be trying to boot on windows.

Please help me...
Kenzucky

[Kenzucky]

Here is what I did in the Terminal : 

$ wget https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-b..._arm64.deb

$ dpkg -i linux-image-4.13.0-rc1-rockchip-ayufan-93-ga1d4fc4_0.5.5_arm64.deb

$ sudo grub-reboot 1 ; reboot

[Luke]

Yes, that likely broke your installation. The Rock64 uses a diffrent SOC than the Pinebook (which uses A64). What were you trying to do ?

[Kenzucky]

I was trying to install Grub to load Mint basically but I lost patience and now it is a mess.

More in details, I wanted to configure my pinebook to initiate the installation of Grub from a specific location.

But I did not know where to start. I discovered too late that it had no BIOS nor UEFI.

The actions I took were :
- attempt to partition an SD card to boot on Grub( partially failed)
- verify whether I had Synaptics, apturl or else (success)
- verify if Grub was installed (not installed)
- change from apturl to synaptic (success)
- verify the distribution (but I suspect the command has been forged to pretend it was Kali Linux)
- download boot-repair and Grub
- try to reboot holding shift/escape (fail)
- enter the commands that broke my installation

[Kenzucky]

@Luke

Can you tell me what is broken exactly ? Is it the software ? Can I buy a new SoC to fix the problem ?

[Luke]

This is an ARM laptop, so it uses uboot. You also won't be able to use a x86 distro (Linux Mint) unless you use rootsfs to build an image yourself (or there is an ARM64 install [edit] for the Pinebook - and there isn't). There isn't a need to buy anything, hardware isn't broken.
Regardless, perhaps there is a way to save your current installation - but you'd have to wait for someone more knowladgable to show up and tell you how (probably need to replace some part of the kernel).

If you don't care too much about your current installation, then all you have to do is flash one of the many different available images (I suggest either ayufan's xenial OR armbian).

[Kenzucky]

Yes but it does not boot, I can't replace a part of the kernel.
I have to learn C and partitioning...on my Windows PC.
Thank you for your precious help.

[pfeerick]

Yes but it does not boot, I can't replace a part of the kernel.
I have to learn C and partitioning...on my Windows PC.
Thank you for your precious help.

But you will be able to boot from a microSD card if you can download and write it on another machine (SD boots before eMMC on pinebook).

You may be able to 'simply' boot from a microSD with the same or similar image to which you had on the pinebooks eMMC, and once it's booted, copy the kernel and Image files across from the microSD /boot partition to the eMMC /boot partition.

I strongly doubt any hardware is damaged, and it should be possible to recover the system by replacing that kernel. However, I don't know what other problems that might arise due to broken package repo etc is another problems, etc. That's for someone else more knowledgeable to comment on

[Kenzucky]

It does not boot, but thanks for trying to help me.