PP boots into factory test even if flashed sd card is inserted

[hapster]

Hej guys,

I finally got my pinephone and I am stoked by how much has been achieved so far!

Obviously I was super intent to flash my pinephone and get it to work asap (at least, what "working" currently means). I chose pmOS.

Unfortunately, I have, so far, been unable to get pmOS to work when flashed to a microSD card. Whenever I insert the SD card, which I flashed on my linux desktop, in the pinephone, the pinephone boots into the factory image. Am I doing something wrong, have I missed something?

Here's what I did:
1) Install pmbootstrap and pull
2) pmbootstrap status
2) Insert SD Card with adapter (it is /dev/sdc)
3) pmbootstrap init (tried several times, both with "phosh" and "plasma mobile"
4) pmbootstrap install --sdcard /dev/sdc
5) pmboostrap zap && pmbootstrap shutdown
6) insert sd card in pinephone, start pinephone

Before I did these steps, I already tried flashing the sd card with the newest (04/10) image using etcher. The same did happen, that is, it did not boot into pmOS but brought me to the factory test image instead.

Any help is greatly appreciated :-)

[MartijnBraam]

hmm the steps you executed seem fine (the zap and shutdown aren't really needed, but don't harm in this case). Either the pinephone somehow has issues reading the SD card or something is going wrong with flashing.

If it boots into factorytest it means it didn't load the u-boot from the sdcard so it used u-boot from the eMMC which boots factorytest if it hasn't been overwritten.

do you see 2 partitions on the sd card after puttting postmarketOS on it? it should have a small boot partition and a larger rootfs.

[hapster]

hmm the steps you executed seem fine (the zap and shutdown aren't really needed, but don't harm in this case). Either the pinephone somehow has issues reading the SD card or something is going wrong with flashing.

If it boots into factorytest it means it didn't load the u-boot from the sdcard so it used u-boot from the eMMC which boots factorytest if it hasn't been overwritten.

do you see 2 partitions on the sd card after puttting postmarketOS on it? it should have a small boot partition and a larger rootfs.

Thanks for your very quick reply, much appreciated.

So, I can see both partitions after having flashed the sd card. Is there a test I can run to check if all necessary files have been written to the sd card?
Also, the sd card was newly purchased, that is, it has not been used prior to its usage for the pinephone.

Note that I was unable to access the pinephone's internal storage via gparted. I figured that if I formatted internal storage, then the pinephone will be forced to read from sd. But, since the internal storage wasnt recognised in gparted, and I was unable to mount it in the file managet (where it does show!), I couldn't do this.

Any idea what could be the problem or what I might do to troubleshoot?

Greetings

[MartijnBraam]

Erasing the eMMC won't force it to use SD, it the SD worked it would've booted that already.

Probably the only way to figure out why it isn't booting the SD is a serial debug cable.

Also how did you try to access the pinephone with gparted? the factorytest image doesn't expose storage.

[hapster]

Hej,

do you mean this cable? https://store.pine64.org/?product=pinebo...al-console

I'm asking because I dont yet have one and want to make sure it works for the pinephone as well.

Will have a look into serial debugging. Got a particular resource to recommend as a starter?

[MartijnBraam]

Yeah that one should work.

The basic usage is: setting the headphone killswitch in the pinephone to the UART position. connect it to your computer and open any serial terminal application (like screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200).

If you now boot the phone you should get u-boot debug messages and it should log the error.