Another Newb Unable to Boot From microSD
10-25-2020, 05:45 PM
I'm not reallly a Linux newb. I used to be a sysadmin with a farm of RedHat & Gentoo servers, and I've been toying around with various distros as home servers, all over a 20y timespan. I only really have experience with Mint/Cinnamon as a desktop system, though (7-8y). I am a total Pine newb, though. Beta quality open source hardware is making me feel like a first-timer, to be sure.
My factory Manjaro install on eMMC seems to work fine, though it won't sleep; the magnet issue, presumably, but that's for another time. My initial PEBCAK is that I opened my shiny new delivery while I was dead tired (I work the graveyard shift these days). I did the initial setup immediately. I used a 3-word combo for the root pw, and when I woke up that evening, I only remembered the first two words. SMH. The kids & I have been playing with it without issue in my user account for 2 months, but man are the software updates piling up without root access. lol
I bought a microSD card (SanDisk Extreme Plus, 128GB, XC1, V30, U3, A2 are all of the markings on it). I've tried imaging to it with DD (CygWin on our current Win7 desktop), vanilla Etcher, and then finally the Pine64 installer version of Etcher. I've tried imaging most of the available distros found on the PBP wiki. None will boot. I have not opened the case or otherwise tried to disable the eMMC. I saw in my early reading that the microSD card comes first in the boot order. Regardless of distro/image or warm/cold boot, I get the same result; about 10s of amber power light, followed by green, at which point the screen appears to power on (dead black to backlit but still black). Then, nothing. I tried increasing the screen brightness just to make sure. =)
If I insert the imaged SD card into the PBP while it's running Manjaro, and scope out the SD with Dolphin, I can see that the image appears to be intact, insofar as I see all of the expected Linux file structure.
My reading showed that SD quality could be an issue. I downloaded H2testw on the Windows desktop and tested this card. It wrote and verified without issue, but the write speed was a consistent 17.6MB/s, which seemed kind of slow compared to the 50ish that I see in other threads. I'm using a little multi-card USB reader, plugged into the USB hub in my monitor.
I'd really like to just get it back to its factory state and put in a root pw that I, you know, remember. Where shall I go next?
Thanks for reading, and sorry for being long-winded, but I didn't want to skip over any small but important items.
My factory Manjaro install on eMMC seems to work fine, though it won't sleep; the magnet issue, presumably, but that's for another time. My initial PEBCAK is that I opened my shiny new delivery while I was dead tired (I work the graveyard shift these days). I did the initial setup immediately. I used a 3-word combo for the root pw, and when I woke up that evening, I only remembered the first two words. SMH. The kids & I have been playing with it without issue in my user account for 2 months, but man are the software updates piling up without root access. lol
I bought a microSD card (SanDisk Extreme Plus, 128GB, XC1, V30, U3, A2 are all of the markings on it). I've tried imaging to it with DD (CygWin on our current Win7 desktop), vanilla Etcher, and then finally the Pine64 installer version of Etcher. I've tried imaging most of the available distros found on the PBP wiki. None will boot. I have not opened the case or otherwise tried to disable the eMMC. I saw in my early reading that the microSD card comes first in the boot order. Regardless of distro/image or warm/cold boot, I get the same result; about 10s of amber power light, followed by green, at which point the screen appears to power on (dead black to backlit but still black). Then, nothing. I tried increasing the screen brightness just to make sure. =)
If I insert the imaged SD card into the PBP while it's running Manjaro, and scope out the SD with Dolphin, I can see that the image appears to be intact, insofar as I see all of the expected Linux file structure.
My reading showed that SD quality could be an issue. I downloaded H2testw on the Windows desktop and tested this card. It wrote and verified without issue, but the write speed was a consistent 17.6MB/s, which seemed kind of slow compared to the 50ish that I see in other threads. I'm using a little multi-card USB reader, plugged into the USB hub in my monitor.
I'd really like to just get it back to its factory state and put in a root pw that I, you know, remember. Where shall I go next?
Thanks for reading, and sorry for being long-winded, but I didn't want to skip over any small but important items.