Installing debian on pinebook pro (deb installer/emmc)

[ljones]

Been trying to think about how to do this at all btw!

Then I thought -- I have a rockpro64 I just recently bought here and it has removable emmc, just like the pinebook pro; I also now have the emmc to usb adapter. Since that and the pinebook pro has very similar hardware I decided to try things out on the rockpro64 first but avoid trying to do anything with the SPI.

I made a little bit of progress and eventually got the rockpro64 to boot off the emmc but not successfully. Here's what I tried.

- Installed debian to the emmc on the rockpro64 via the usb adapter. Used the installer to make two partitions a 128MB fat32 partition (sda1) and a linux partition ext4 (sda5). Made sda5 bootable.

- Booted off an already working debian install from a micro sd card on the rockpro64. Left the emmc to usb adapter plugged into the usb port on the rockpro64. Then did:

Code:

$ mkdir /tmp/0
$ mount /dev/sda5 /tmp/0 -o rw
$ mount -o bind /dev /tmp/0/dev
$ chroot /tmp/0
$ apt install u-boot-rockchip

then

Code:

$ u-boot-install-rockchip /dev/sda1

But that didn't work and I eneded up getting error "dd: failed to open /idbloader.img : no such file or directory". After finding the relevent file(s) I then did

Code:

$ cd /usr/lib/u-boot/rockpro64-rk3399/
$ cp * /

(That copied idbloader.img, rk3399-rockpro64.dtb, u-boot.bin, uboot.elf, u-boot.img, u-boot-nodtb.bin, u-boot-spi.bin and i-boot-tpl.bin to / ). Then;

Code:

$ cd /
$ u-boot-install-rockchip /dev/sda1

This worked and said:

Code:

Writing idbloader
328+1 records in
328+1 records out
168320 bytes (168kB, 164 KiB) copied, 0.050321 s, 3.3 MB/s
Writing u-boot image
1919+1 records in
1919+1 records out
983008 bytes (983 kB, 869 KiB) copied, 0.338676 s, 2.9MB/s

I then powered off the rockpro64 and removed the microsd card and the jumper (emmc disable) from the rockpro64. I then placed the emmc onto the rockpro64.

The system boots and I get messages on screen, but it stops at "Starting kernel ...." !

Any ideas?

ljones