Pinebook Pro doesn't boot most of the time unless connected via USB-serial!
09-24-2020, 08:17 AM
>Ah, uboot.. You realize that uboot also has a dtb, obviously not correct, not finding mmc,, emmc
The very strange thing is that sometimes it does find it, especially if the USB-serial cable is plugged in. Because of that I thought that maybe it could be a power issue and plugging in the cable powers the board directly bypassing the battery. It does start without the cable sometimes though.
By the way, what is the difference between the mmc and the emmc on the pinebook? I saw in the error logs that it was trying to locate MMC1 & MMC2 which, as I understand, are different from the eMMC.
>>Since I was trying different versions of the distro
>I assume these were booting?
They were booting from the SD, yes. I think I tried a couple, the swaywm one and mostly variations of a minimal manjaro system I was building using the manjaro-arm-installer (https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/a...-installer) with and without encryption.
>Experiment time!!!!
>(with dd) save emmc mbr, first 16M of emmc , blank first 16M, restore mbr
>This then will be forced to use uboot on SD card, test various uboots, various distros
>To make double sure, save SD mbr, delete all partitions with fdisk/cfdisk (on SD)
>This then will be forced to use SD uboot and emmc distro
>If seems OK, after several boots, copy 1st 16M SD ->emmc, restore emmc mbr
The SD card also doesn't boot every time now! I just tried it and it didn't, so I'm not sure this could solve this problem.
>I prefer mrfixits uboot.
Could you explain what's the difference? I'm a newbie when it comes to u-boot, its the first time I messed with it. Do you think that with these symptoms, it could be a bootloader issue?
Thanks!
The very strange thing is that sometimes it does find it, especially if the USB-serial cable is plugged in. Because of that I thought that maybe it could be a power issue and plugging in the cable powers the board directly bypassing the battery. It does start without the cable sometimes though.
By the way, what is the difference between the mmc and the emmc on the pinebook? I saw in the error logs that it was trying to locate MMC1 & MMC2 which, as I understand, are different from the eMMC.
>>Since I was trying different versions of the distro
>I assume these were booting?
They were booting from the SD, yes. I think I tried a couple, the swaywm one and mostly variations of a minimal manjaro system I was building using the manjaro-arm-installer (https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/a...-installer) with and without encryption.
>Experiment time!!!!
>(with dd) save emmc mbr, first 16M of emmc , blank first 16M, restore mbr
>This then will be forced to use uboot on SD card, test various uboots, various distros
>To make double sure, save SD mbr, delete all partitions with fdisk/cfdisk (on SD)
>This then will be forced to use SD uboot and emmc distro
>If seems OK, after several boots, copy 1st 16M SD ->emmc, restore emmc mbr
The SD card also doesn't boot every time now! I just tried it and it didn't, so I'm not sure this could solve this problem.
>I prefer mrfixits uboot.
Could you explain what's the difference? I'm a newbie when it comes to u-boot, its the first time I messed with it. Do you think that with these symptoms, it could be a bootloader issue?
Thanks!