Tow-boot headaches.
04-30-2023, 05:03 PM
More precisely, the main difference when it comes to booting is that the regular PinePhone has 2 bootable memory interfaces (eMMC, microSD), the PinePhone Pro has 3 (SPI, eMMC, microSD). The PinePhone Pro's SPI is a small memory dedicated to booting, and that is where Pine64 preinstalls Tow-Boot on the PinePhone Pro. But your regular PinePhone does not have an SPI. Hence, it also does not come with Tow-Boot preinstalled. Instead, as was already explained above, the eMMC comes preinstalled with a Manjaro image that includes its own U-Boot bootloader. But if you overwrite the eMMC completely, you also overwrite that bootloader, since there is no separate SPI memory on your device, it is all on the eMMC.