Can I recover bricked device from Mask ROM mode?

[Damage]

You did nothing dumb to me, this is just perfectly normal and sane hacking around

I didn't have the problems you encountered with wifi and updates (although indeed, camera does not work for me as well on pinephone pro), so I can't exclude the possibility of a hardware issue, but if you're trying to fix a broken install on the eMMC, you're almost there. I use pacman directly to perform my updates, though, so maybe I would have had the same issue using a GUI.

You did almost everything that you should : flashing an OS on a SD card and bypassing the eMMC to boot on the card (gladly, we can now do that, which allow to not brick the phone if we install a bogus uboot on the eMMC). Now the only thing you need to do is to flash an image on the eMMC.

For that, download a pinephone pro image on your temporary OS (beware not downloading a pinephone image, they're not the same!) and copy it to your eMMC.

To find the device name, use `lsblk`. The device will probably be `mmcblk1` or `mmcblk2`. The SD card you are currently using is the device with one partition mentioned as being mounted as root partition (a "/" in the column "mountpoint"), so the eMMC device is the other one.

Once you found the eMMC device, you can flash the image using `dd`, which copies a file at an other location:

    sudo dd if=</path/to/your/image/file> of=</path/to/your/device> bs=1M

`if` means "input file" (the image), `of` means "output file" (the device) and `bs` is the buffer size (how many bytes copied at a time ; the higher the faster, but the more ram used and the most prone to error - 1M is usually fast and safe).

Once done, the OS is installed on the eMMC, you can just reboot.

Note that if you mistakenly write on the device of the SD card instead of the eMMC, it's no biggie either : just flash again an OS on the SD card and start over.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. However, I cannot boot from the SD card either - I just get a blank screen and green LED.

I can see the device via $lsusb from my desktop PC, so I wondered what I could do given that seems to be my only access.

The need to tinker is too strong, so I tried the Manjaro-ARM-phosh-pinephonepro-beta21 image again...still nothing.

At least I can regularly connect to the PC - the reset button needs to be pressed for at least 5 seconds (I do 10) while plugging in USB cable - I used a wooden BBQ skewer which seems more reliable than smaller items.