Tow-boot on Pinephone beta edition

[mark1250]

When I went to install tow-boot onto my Pinephone A64, I wasn't really paying attention to the file I downloaded. I just used xzcat and piped it to dd and wrote it to my SD card. And, it didn't work. After scratching my head a bit, I finally realized that the file you download contains 2 disk images and is not directly flashable.

When you download tow-boot from github: https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/rel...005.tar.xz you have to extract it.

I used: unxz pine64-pinephoneA64-2021.10-005.tar.xz

Then  untar the tar file: tar -xf pine64-pinephoneA64-2021.10-005.tar

- There is probably a single command that will do this, but I was too lazy to look it up.

You'll end up with a folder with 2 .img files. dd or etcher... the mmcboot.installer.img image file to your SD card. Pop the SD card into your Pinephone and the tow-boot installer should boot and an install menu will appear on the phone screen.

Because the Pinephone A64 looks for the boot loader on the SD card then eMMC, it will boot off an SD card that has u-boot on it. If you don't want this you'll have to remove u-boot from the SD card. There are instructions on the wiki: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_I..._from_eMMC