(08-10-2022, 01:06 PM)wdt Wrote: OK, I see you said you have usb -> emmc adapter
make an image of present emmc, maybe on usb key on pbp
dd if=/dev/emmc of=/mnt/sda/emmc.img bs=1M status=progress
(if you don't have a big enough key, pipeline thru gzip,, as so
dd if=dev/emmc bs=1M|gzip >someplace, usb key,,emmc.gz)
Then, with adapter you easily restore any screw-up,
that is I am assuming you have another computer?
Then do a install (of armbian) on emmc,,,DO NOT shut it off
until you ALSO install pcm uboot to emmc (as last step before reboot)
See, with a partition copy install, fstab, boot.scr and probably the initrd need to be adjusted
Because those are all set for the SD
---
BTW,,,pbp reboot is flakey, do a shut off, reboot often hangs
I think you have suggested a good plan. Thanks so much for your help.
I have an amd64 architecture laptop running MX-Linux and also a Pinephone with the PP docking station. Either could be used to image my PBP eMMC with my USB eMMC adapter. I think I trust a hard disk drive more than SD cards for backup, though...or my NVMe SSD but I don't have an NVMe USB adapter.
Though generally reliable, even the SanDisk SD cards that Armbian recommends can be a little flaky sometimes, but usually they are much better than other brands.
My Manjaro / is on NVMe. It has plenty of space for the eMMC image and it and the eMMC have proven to be accessible with PCM U-boot on the Armbian SD. Manjaro is my daily driver system that I'm trying to protect, but it mounts /boot from the eMMC. However, it works with /boot on NVMe too (though Manjaro kernel updates have proven to risky with /boot on the NVMe so I now keep /boot on the eMMC--there's really little downside given that U-boot is on the eMMC too). The important thing is to be able to restore PCM720's U-boot on the eMMC but that should be possible with the USB adapter and another machine too. I think a couple of backup and restore strategies are in order, just in case something doesn't work out.
Yeah--full power down has proven to be best for both my PBP and my PP. Even with a full power-down, it will sometimes boot my Manjaro system (boot on eMMC and / on NVMe) when it should boot the micro SD. A second try usually works as expected. This machine has always had boot flakiness when moving things around. Once setup and booting as desired, it's quite stable though. Strange!
