what is the magic dd incantation to copy the system from the sd card to the emmc?

[calinb]

If there is an emmc, with a distro, then it is using that uboot

I expected Armbian to use my eMMC uboot, because it's the first uboot in the boot order in the hard-coded ROM. (According to the PBP wiki, the order is SPI, eMMC, SD, USB OTG.) I have been using PCM720's uboot on emmc for over a year now. It boots Manjaro configured with / or /boot on either NVMe or eMMC. Although PCM720 provided a SPI binary and I also compiled his code myself, I've never been brave enough to flash it to SPI memory! The Manjaro uboot functions similar to PCM720's code, I think.

As an aside note, I've twice had boot failures after a Manjaro kernel update, but only when I had /boot and / on my nVME. After I twice recovered the system from backup, I found that the kernel update did not cause a problem when /boot is on eMMC so I've been running /boot on eMMC and / on NVMe since the second time the update killed my system. I also built the same kernels that were in the problematic updates myself, and the package that my build produced did not result in the failure. Manjaro forum mod Stritt and I never got to the bottom of it.

So, armbians uboot is not quite right
You have a SD boot, pull (or disable emmc), you wont have a boot

So you are saying that even though the SD card is in the boot order, the uboot on the Armbian SD image does not function quite right so Armbian will not boot if there is no upstream uboot code in SPI or eMMC? Again, I realize that I'm using my eMMC uboot.

And you can verify,,, save SD mbr (1 sector), write emmc uboot (1st 16M) to SD, restore SD mbr
The test with emmc removed/disabled
armbian uses boot.txt, run thru a simple compiler to make boot.scr
This is one of the things uboot looks for
While the kernel has to be configured to use nvme, 1st uboot has to find it (and be able to read it)
This feature is only 2.5 yrs old now,,, mrfixit the 1st IIUR

I would be happy to get Armbian / running on eMMC or NVMe with /boot on the SD card (like Slackware does and I could umount /boot and remove the SD card after booting) but I couldn't get that to work either. I edited the armbianENV.txt file and fstab but Armbian complained that it could not find a device with the specified UUID.

It's really a shame, because Armbian is incredibly stable but I don't understand its boot process or how to re-compile the necessary boot files. Manjaro has this nasty ALSA bug and it's going to be tough to debug too, whereas ALSA works correctly in Armbian. Do you know anything about ALSA, wdt?

https://forum.manjaro.org/t/alsa-segment...d/118704/2