Flashing image to EMMC

[Styles]

Hi All,

I received my PBP last week, all working fine out of the box, love the device so far!

The only issue I've had so far is that the image on the EMMC seems to be corrupted, I can boot from SD cards just fine, posting this from the standard Debian.

What's strange, once I've booted from a SD I can boot the device from the EMMC once or twice but after it will just loop through the boot process. Sometimes it will get to the logon screen but it will hang there and after a period of time it will power cycle again.

Is there a straight forward way to flash the Debian image to the EMMC storage when booted from a SD? So far it seems my only option is to get the USB adapter and do it that way.

[tophneal]

Since you already have the Debian running on an SD, you could use this installer script to reinstall it to your emmc. You can also use xcat or dd to copy compressed, or uncompressed, img.gz files. The adapter is very handy to just plug into your computer and burn with Etcher, but it is far from necessary.

[hmuller]

What's strange, once I've booted from a SD I can boot the device from the EMMC once or twice but after it will just loop through the boot process. Sometimes it will get to the logon screen but it will hang there and after a period of time it will power cycle again.

Have you checked that the eMMC module is fully seated in its connector? You can find assembly/disassembly instructions here. It is odd that it is working intermittently.

You can find the eMMC module in this picture. It is labeled #26.

[Styles]

What's strange, once I've booted from a SD I can boot the device from the EMMC once or twice but after it will just loop through the boot process. Sometimes it will get to the logon screen but it will hang there and after a period of time it will power cycle again.

Have you checked that the eMMC module is fully seated in its connector? You can find assembly/disassembly instructions here. It is odd that it is working intermittently.

You can find the eMMC module in this picture. It is labeled #26.

Yeah, I reseated it, pressed down firmly. Seems fine no wobble or anything.

Its really odd because its started whining, last couple days. I tried running the installer script but I probably targeted the wrong drive will try again. Otherwise I'll just mess in the SD card for now.

[Styles]

Okay so I thought I'd give the Manjaro image a try, dropped it onto a 200 gb SD card.

If I run df -h I can only see the SD card, I'm assuming I should be able to see the EMMC drive there. Seems like its faulty to me. Edit: at least this explains why I couldn't reflash the EMMC...

On a side note, can we boot these from NVME drives? I read that its not possible but the post was from a while ago.

[Arwen]

@Styles, You may not be able to see the eMMC drive using "df -h". Depends on a few things.

I tend to use "fdisk -l" which will list all the disks. The one that shows up similar to the below is the eMMC. The other "mmcblk" device would be your SD card.

mmcblk1boot0
mmcblk1boot1
mmcblk1rpmb
mmcblk1

Only the last one is really usable. It's a quirk of the eMMC standard that we have the other 3.

If you have entries like this, they are partitions on the device;

mmcblk1p1
mmcblk1p2
mmcblk1p3
...

[Styles]

@Arwen
Thanks for the tip! I can actually see it there now, mmcblk2.
I'll have another crack at flashing it now. Will post back with results.

Clearly need to brush up on disk stuff in Linux!

[tophneal]

On a side note, can we boot these from NVME drives? I read that its not possible but the post was from a  while ago.

Yes. And according to strit, in the IRC, this code for NVMe support is now in the uboot shipped with Manjaro.

[Styles]

On a side note, can we boot these from NVME drives? I read that its not possible but the post was from a  while ago.

Yes. And according to strit, in the IRC, this code for NVMe support is now in the uboot shipped with Manjaro.

Thanks that will be the next bit of tinkering I do.

@Arwen 
Thanks again for the tip, got it sorted now booting from the eMMC!

[f1refl1r]

Since you already have the Debian running on an SD, you could use this installer script to reinstall it to your emmc. You can also use xcat or dd to copy compressed, or uncompressed, img.gz files. The adapter is very handy to just plug into your computer and burn with Etcher, but it is far from necessary.

I am still figuring things out and I want to re-install the original OS on my Pinebook Pro. I managed to get the Debian on a SD card and are able to boot the PBP from teh SD card. How do I run the installer script now?
 
Cheers