Pinephone is dead (sort of)
12-31-2021, 11:14 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-31-2021, 11:21 AM by Zebulon Walton.)
I've never used Balena Etcher so don't know if there's something there that might be causing a problem. I use the old "dd" program that Linux inherited from ancient Unix systems. (My circa 1981 Unix manual can largely serve as a guide for dd and other utililities in modern Linux!) So what you might want to do is boot up on your Ubuntu flash drive and try using dd to flash your SD card instead of Etcher.
You need first to determine positively what the device node (/dev/sdX) is for your SD card. You can do this a couple of ways. I usually just monitor the syslog file as previously documented to pick up the device node. You could also use the Gnome Disks or GParted software to identify it. You want to be absolutely sure because "dd" has no safety net, it will do exactly what you tell it to do whether that is what you actually want or not. (It will happily over-write your system disk if you give it the wrong device!) If using Gnome Disks, this is the kind of thing you'll see to identify your SD card, which in my case is a 16GB card:
![[Image: S0UZ9Olq_o.png]](https://images2.imgbox.com/14/8e/S0UZ9Olq_o.png)
So after determining the SD card device node enter the following command, substituting the actual image filename for filename.img and the actual device node for /dev/sdX:
sudo dd if=filename.img of=/dev/sdX bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync
Due to the simplicity of dd's operation this will create a byte-for-byte copy of the image file on the SD card, and flush buffers out before returning to the command prompt, without question as long as there are no read or write errors. (Be certain to wait for dd to drop back to the command prompt. Even if it says 100% done, that just means that the last part of the file has filled the buffer but dd will still be writing to your SD card until the command prompt is back.)
You need first to determine positively what the device node (/dev/sdX) is for your SD card. You can do this a couple of ways. I usually just monitor the syslog file as previously documented to pick up the device node. You could also use the Gnome Disks or GParted software to identify it. You want to be absolutely sure because "dd" has no safety net, it will do exactly what you tell it to do whether that is what you actually want or not. (It will happily over-write your system disk if you give it the wrong device!) If using Gnome Disks, this is the kind of thing you'll see to identify your SD card, which in my case is a 16GB card:
So after determining the SD card device node enter the following command, substituting the actual image filename for filename.img and the actual device node for /dev/sdX:
sudo dd if=filename.img of=/dev/sdX bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync
Due to the simplicity of dd's operation this will create a byte-for-byte copy of the image file on the SD card, and flush buffers out before returning to the command prompt, without question as long as there are no read or write errors. (Be certain to wait for dd to drop back to the command prompt. Even if it says 100% done, that just means that the last part of the file has filled the buffer but dd will still be writing to your SD card until the command prompt is back.)