An unofficial Debian Installer for Pinebook Pro

[bryanpaget]

Help needed

Forgive my noobiness, but I need some help.  I want to make the move from Windows to Linux.   I have used linux for a few years, but not seriously.  Now I am getting serious! 

I was gifted a Pinebook Pro for my birthday and am trying to try out different distris.  Machine was installed with Manjaro, but I wanted Ubuntu, so a friend of mine installed Armbian (on the emmc), which is really lovely, but I want to experiment with other distris on the sd.   

So, I cloned the Git repo for this script described here and it goes through the installation process, seemingly successfully.   When I go to start my machine, it just starts Armbian and ignores the debian installation on the sd card.  This is what I have done to test

• to make sure my sd drive is working correctly, I inserted the the copy of Armbian which was dd'd to my emmc.   It booted fine.  So SD is not the problem
  
• I thought that maybe it could be a dud card, so I tried another one, much quicker, that I know works and I get the same result, nothing and then boots from emmc
  
• I've mounted both SDCards and they were successfully written to
  

So, I am beyond my knowledge at this moment in time.

I would really appreciate some guidance here

I ran into the same issue and I have two solutions for you.

1. Open the laptop and physically remove the emmc module and boot the laptop from an sdcard. You'll have to reinstall the emmc module mid boot for the OS to recognize the emmc module (i.e. if you pop the emmc back in too soon you'll boot off emmc and if you wait too long the OS won't mount the emmc). Once you've booted from the sdcard you can flash an image to the emmc. You'll probably want to put an iso on a usb thumb drive for this purpose. I did this but I don't recommend this since my friend also had the same problem with Armbian and he did #2.

2. Boot the laptop (you'll be running the OS installed on the emmc) then using dd flash a disk image to the emmc. You are overwriting the running OS. Then reboot. Should work. Sounds nuts but it worked for him.