Pinebook Pro bricked?

[wofam]

Buy the eMMMC to USB adapter?   IMO, that should come with the system.

There are two different "boot priorities" on the PBP - the firmware, and the OS.

The firmware priority (uboot, ATF, etc) is SPI, eMMC, SD.

The OS boot priority is then set by the firmware, but is typically SD, eMMC.

This means that if you've fouled out something with the firmware on the eMMC to a point where it is recognized as firmware but doesn't work properly, booting from SD won't work - because the system fails somewhere before it tries to load a kernel from the SD card.

It's... admittedly an interesting design decision (I disagree with it).  I'd personally prefer it to be the other way, because it makes firmware development a lot easier, but if you're doing that, you can always just disable the eMMC and work from SD card.  I'd prefer SPI, SD, eMMC for firmware search order, because that makes it far harder to get the system into a "requires more fiddling than usual to recover" state - you could always put a good SD card in and boot to recover eMMC.

I'd have to agree that the current set up is a bit inconvenient in this sort of circumstance. Unscrewing the case and manually switching the eMMC module on/off should be a last resort. Maybe it will be taken into consideration during future improvements

According to PBP wiki "The Pinebook Pro is capable of booting from eMMC, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, or an SD card." Is this recent? I thought USB booting wasn't supported....