Copy To SD Card, All I get Is Red Light & Black Screen . . . .

[NobodyNew1]

Hello,
Am I missing something here ? I've following the instruction on how to get ubuntu touch on a SD and I always end up with that little red light in the top left of the phone and a black / blank screen. i have the SD Card formatted to FAT32. I'm using Mint 20. I've used the built in writer ( Not sure what the disk imager / writer is called on Mint ) I've simply take the image and drop it into the SD Card and the outcome is still the same.
I assume its me missing a step or something, but don't know what it could be. The SD Card works, I previously used it to put jumpstart on it when I got locked out of my phone. I'm using the PMOS release.

Image used : https://ci.ubports.com/job/rootfs/job/ro...sfulBuild/
Instructions followed : https://gitlab.com/ubports/community-ports/pinephone

I am using a San Disk micro sd 32GB, it's compatible with the the PinePhone as jumpstart worked and copied to it. Sorry trying to list everything I can think of in one post.I think that's it. Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Thanks !!

Have you tried 'Balena Etcher'  I have had 98% success rate, Using Mint Debian Edition.
   ( I would suggest formatting to ext4 if pre-formating )

I've tried Etcher as well. This is what I just came a cross and didn't think to put it in my post, but I guess this is the issue or could be the issue ( I have 3GB PMOS / convergence which is 3GB not 2GB ) :

A newly installed OS does not boot on 3GB PinePhone
U-Boot did not have support for A64 chips with 3GB RAM, and un-patched versions will fail to boot on 3GB (Convergence Package) PinePhones.
The patch/commit required is titled: "sunxi: support asymmetric dual rank DRAM on A64/R40"
As of 3rd September 2020, these distributions are known to work:

• PinePhone_Software_Releases#postmarketOS
  
• PinePhone_Software_Releases#Arch_Linux_ARM
  
• PinePhone_Software_Releases#Mobian
  

I'm going to put Mobian on a SD really quickly and see the out come, To be continued . . . . . .

---

To flash the SD card, you need to replace the whole partition scheme and any file systems on the card with what's in the image. I.e. it's not enough to copy the image into an existing filesystem on the card; you need to overwrite whatever filesystem and partition setup that's on the card (which also means it doesn't matter how the card is formatted to begin with).

I prefer to use 'dd' to write disk images. Make absolutely sure you have the correct device name for your SD card; using the wrong one might overwrite your hard drive! I usually run 'sudo journalctl -f' and watch the output while inserting my card to see the device name. The  output might look something like this:

mmc0: new high speed SDHC card at address 0007
mmcblk0: mmc0:0007 SL16G 14.5 GB
mmcblk0: p1 p2

This means that the card (block) device is called mmcblk0 (and it has two existing partitions: p1 and p2). Devices are accessed under /dev in the file system, so the complete path in this case is '/dev/mmcblk0' (which I will use in the example below).

The image is compressed with xz. Write it like this:

xzcat ubuntu-touch-pinephone.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M status=progress

This uncompresses the xz image and pipes it to dd that does the actual writing to the card.

I'm going to follow this right now and will post the outcome. I also came across this, which seeing I have the 3GB phone that could simply be the issue. I never thought to put that in my original post. I'll try UbuntuT and Mobian both, and if Mobian works then its this 3GB.
Thanks for your help and writing out those commands for me.

A newly installed OS does not boot on 3GB PinePhone
U-Boot did not have support for A64 chips with 3GB RAM, and un-patched versions will fail to boot on 3GB (Convergence Package) PinePhones.
The patch/commit required is titled: "sunxi: support asymmetric dual rank DRAM on A64/R40"
As of 3rd September 2020, these distributions are known to work:

• PinePhone_Software_Releases#postmarketOS
  
• PinePhone_Software_Releases#Arch_Linux_ARM
  
• PinePhone_Software_Releases#Mobian
  

Ubuntu T. Failed, still the same red light and blank screen.
Mobian and Arch work.

So, my noob conclusion, must be what was written above as this PMOS version with convergence has 3GB RAM oppose to other releases having only 2GB, bc I can put JumpDrive on my SD Card and it works. I was also able to use JumpDrive and reinstall PMOS on the phone after getting locked out due to a encryption passphrase issue. Looks like I'm locked into PMOS until this 3GB issue is ironed out with the other OS's. Which isn't a bad thing, it just would have been nice to have another OS on a SD and be able to learn and tinker with more than just 1 OS.