10-23-2025, 09:59 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-23-2025, 10:53 PM by Der Geist der Maschine.)
My original emmc was about to die after a few years. I then bought a 256GB emmc from Amazon. I went with Amazon for three reasons: Pine charges horrendous shipping fees and if I recall correctly the 256GB emmc was cheaper than Pine's 128GB emmc and I'm frustrated with the quality of Pine's emmcs [see thread https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=15121].
It's always good to have linux on an SD card so when something fails on the emmc you can boot the SD card and investigate the emmc.
1. I booted linux on the SD card, did a dd of the emmc over wifi to some desktop computer (sshfs, nfs or some creative scp command will all work).
2. I shut down linux. I then swapped the emmcs (old out, new in).
3. I booted linux on the SD card, did a dd back over wifi from the desktop onto the new emmc.
4. While still having booted linux from the sd card, I changed the partition size of the last partition to extend to the full size of the new emmc and resized its filesystem. That's it - you don't need to change UUIDs. That becomes a little trickier when your partitions are encrypted.
dd has some nice options to ignore unallocated space. That speeds up dding out and in the emmc. That also reduced number writes and that is always good for emmcs.
You can use your usb adapter instead of wifi. You should not dd out the old emmc when you booted from it (the running system makes minor changes to the filesystem as you dd out the raw version). You should dd the old emmc on the new emmc on the usb adapter from a linux running from SD card. Then don't forget my step 4.
It's always good to have linux on an SD card so when something fails on the emmc you can boot the SD card and investigate the emmc.
1. I booted linux on the SD card, did a dd of the emmc over wifi to some desktop computer (sshfs, nfs or some creative scp command will all work).
2. I shut down linux. I then swapped the emmcs (old out, new in).
3. I booted linux on the SD card, did a dd back over wifi from the desktop onto the new emmc.
4. While still having booted linux from the sd card, I changed the partition size of the last partition to extend to the full size of the new emmc and resized its filesystem. That's it - you don't need to change UUIDs. That becomes a little trickier when your partitions are encrypted.
dd has some nice options to ignore unallocated space. That speeds up dding out and in the emmc. That also reduced number writes and that is always good for emmcs.
You can use your usb adapter instead of wifi. You should not dd out the old emmc when you booted from it (the running system makes minor changes to the filesystem as you dd out the raw version). You should dd the old emmc on the new emmc on the usb adapter from a linux running from SD card. Then don't forget my step 4.