SD Card boot - trying out OS

[Baconomics]

Hello!

Brand new user, love the Pinebook Pro so far. Very new to Linux as a whole, very new to most of the things this laptop can do lol. So:

I'm trying to boot an OS from my SD card, hopefully to try out different things like Android and Debian etc.
I downloaded the Android 7 image from the Pine64 site, matching the size of my SD card (Sandisk 32GB) and flashed it using Etcher.
Not sure if I downloaded the right image, however the SD card disappeared from the computer, doesn't show up in my Files.

1.) How do I boot from the card?
2.) How do I format the card if I need to redo this?

Looking forward to learning, thanks all!

[tophneal]

Hello!

Brand new user, love the Pinebook Pro so far. Very new to Linux as a whole, very new to most of the things this laptop can do lol. So:

I'm trying to boot an OS from my SD card, hopefully to try out different things like Android and Debian etc.
I downloaded the Android 7 image from the Pine64 site, matching the size of my SD card (Sandisk 32GB) and flashed it using Etcher.
Not sure if I downloaded the right image, however the SD card disappeared from the computer, doesn't show up in my Files.

1.) How do I boot from the card?
2.) How do I format the card if I need to redo this?

Looking forward to learning, thanks all!

First off, abandon hope of that Android img booting. The pre-sized Android imgs haven't booted on any batch of PBPs. This one will though: http://files.pine64.org/os/PinebookPro/A...oot.img.gz

1: You write the img to the SD using dd or a program like Etcher.
2. You do that however you want, whether its through a disk management software, or dding /dev/zero to it. Once you write an img to it, it will populate it with the img's partitions and files.

If you have a newer batch PBP, with KDE Manjaro, you may need to update/replace your uboot. There's currently an issue where the mainline uboot doesn't play well with imgs using the older BSP uboot (like all the Androids and ChromiumOS imgs use.)

You can replace this with a BSP uboot, and it should allow you to boot up these imgs from SD again. If you want to the files are here: https://github.com/mrfixit2001/updates_repo/tree/v2.0/pinebook/filesystem
You need uboot, idbloader, and trust.img. If you want you can download the uboot update script, or look in it for the necessary commands to write the uboot files to your emmc. This would also open you up to being able to enable the s3 sleep state in Manjaro and other mainline kernel distros.