Can't boot from a microSD card

[fxc]

Right, looks like I was also reading wiki entry for "PinePhone" (not-Pro) on the in the postmarketOS wiki, hence the mixed up info . The volume key info I got from IRC, but that seems to be mistaken too. I actually had no idea about the RE button.

I copied the image the same way I'd create a bootable USB drive using an OS image:

Code:

xz --decompress --stdout 20220406-1001-postmarketOS-v21.12-phosh-17-pine64-pinephone-installer.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=4M status=progress

The partitions on the card look like this after copying the data:

Code:

$ lsblk | grep -v nvme
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINTS
mmcblk0    179:0    0 119.1G  0 disk
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1    0  243M  0 part
├─mmcblk0p2 179:2    0    2G  0 part
└─mmcblk0p3 179:3    0  2.5G  0 part

I'm not sure what the difference between copying an image an "flashing" the drive is -- last time I flashed something was many many years ago and it was usually devices with on-board memory that I needed to flash via USB or serial. I've also never used microSD cards before, so might be missing something that's very obvious to others.

So I'm not pressing the RE button while holding the power button, and the phone simply stays off and doesn't turn on. If I DON'T hold the RE button and just press the power button, it boots up into the eMMC's OS.

As per my timings, I need to hold the power key AT LEAST 11s for the phone to boot, and the screen will only turn on about 10 seconds later, when it's done starting the eMMC's KDE.

Pressing the RE button at any point during the initial 11 seconds results in the phone simply staying off.

Pressing the RE button after the initial 11 seconds usually results in the phone staying off, or booting to the eMMC. When pressing the RE button at the EXACT right moment, it does turn on after a while, but startup fails; the error message was systemd indicating that dependencies for ModemManager had failed and boot stalled.

The tricky part is that I can't figure out when that EXACT moment it; I only got to it by mere chance due to retrying dozens of times (and didn't take a photo of it!). It seems the timings need to be done with PERFECT, or the phone either doesn't boot, or boots off the eMMC.

The main issue here is that you try to boot an image for the regular PinePhone but you own a PinePhone Pro. The PinePhone Pro can not boot regular PinePhone images. The flashing command looks correct and with Tow-Boot there is actually a volume button combination to boot from microSD card (you left out the detail that you're using Tow-Boot), so the RE button is not required in that case.

Please make sure you're downloading your images only from https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_P...e_Releases