11-13-2021, 02:07 AM
(11-12-2021, 09:38 PM)susy1075 Wrote: Thank you for your advice, I tried flashing the sd card from a library computer and balena etcher kept giving me error messages such as “flash failed”.
Theoretically you should be able to use the same CLI commands (dd or bmaptool) to flash an SD card from the PinePhone itself as from a computer. So if you really want to try and your PinePhone is currently at least somewhat usable (i. e. it boots and stays on), you could do it from a terminal on the phone. If your OS runs okay, you could just launch the terminal application and do it from there. If it doesn't, you would need an external keyboard and log into a tty with Ctrl+Alt+F3 (or another F key, look up ttys if you want to know more about that). In either case you would of course need to have the image you want to flash on your phone. You could download it from within the terminal with wget ("wget [URL]"; you might have to install that first). If you use bmaptool, you don't need to download it manually first, you can just specifiy the URL in the bmaptool command. Be careful though that you specify the right device to flash to.
I wouldn't recommend doing it this way to someone completely new to Linux (besides I'm not even sure if it really works). But if you have the patience (to read up on the stuff you don't understand yet) and the need to do it that way ... Be aware though that this whole procedure would only work once with a fresh SD card. Once you have flashed an image to it successfully, the PinePhone will boot from the SD card (since it's before the eMMC in the boot order) and while running an OS from an SD card you should really not attempt to overwrite itself.
