PBP won't boot from eMMC or SD card: a saga
01-12-2021, 02:27 PM
Okay, some seriously weird goings-on now.
I've been trying all manner of things with everyone's comments in mind, and wasn't really getting anywhere. I haven't been able to get consistent results with any method.
Using a ridiculous combo of my desktop, phone, and a USB microphone with an SD card reader, I made a bootable Debian microSD and tried to boot from that but couldn't reliably bypass the eMMC (if I used the hardware switch to disable the eMMC, it usually just wouldn't boot at all).
On the occasions I was able to boot from the Debian SD card, which I wasn't able to do consistently, I couldn't get it to flash an image to the eMMC. It gave an out-of-space error which I couldn't make sense of, so I'm still working with Manjaro on the eMMC and Debian on the SD. I tried to get into maskrom mode because I was afraid I'd accidentally tried to flash Debian to the SPI but neither of the two methods of entering maskrom worked.
I kept trying and re-trying things since some folks had mentioned having to power cycle up to a dozen times to get their PBPs to boot properly. I tried ctrl+alt+bksp and ctrl+alt+fn+bksp (which is to say, ctrl+alt+del) when the Manjaro boot logo appeared, but to no avail.
HOWEVER
On my most recent reboot it froze on the Manjaro boot logo again and I hit ctrl+alt+fn+bksp, and for no discernible reason it went to a Plasma KDE splash screen and then my login screen! Big thanks to whichever one of you did a blood sacrifice ritual for me, which is my best guess as to what happened.
I logged in successfully about twenty minutes ago and things are still running normally. No fires or explosions have occurred and Satan has not shown up to demand repayment. I would still like to factory reset pretty much everything just to make sure I'm not sitting on a time bomb, and the stability of Debian sure sounds appealing, but I'm afraid to turn the thing off again in case this was just a fluke. And god knows I'm sick of troubleshooting mysterious problems by now. Thoughts, anyone?
I've been trying all manner of things with everyone's comments in mind, and wasn't really getting anywhere. I haven't been able to get consistent results with any method.
Using a ridiculous combo of my desktop, phone, and a USB microphone with an SD card reader, I made a bootable Debian microSD and tried to boot from that but couldn't reliably bypass the eMMC (if I used the hardware switch to disable the eMMC, it usually just wouldn't boot at all).
On the occasions I was able to boot from the Debian SD card, which I wasn't able to do consistently, I couldn't get it to flash an image to the eMMC. It gave an out-of-space error which I couldn't make sense of, so I'm still working with Manjaro on the eMMC and Debian on the SD. I tried to get into maskrom mode because I was afraid I'd accidentally tried to flash Debian to the SPI but neither of the two methods of entering maskrom worked.
I kept trying and re-trying things since some folks had mentioned having to power cycle up to a dozen times to get their PBPs to boot properly. I tried ctrl+alt+bksp and ctrl+alt+fn+bksp (which is to say, ctrl+alt+del) when the Manjaro boot logo appeared, but to no avail.
HOWEVER
On my most recent reboot it froze on the Manjaro boot logo again and I hit ctrl+alt+fn+bksp, and for no discernible reason it went to a Plasma KDE splash screen and then my login screen! Big thanks to whichever one of you did a blood sacrifice ritual for me, which is my best guess as to what happened.
I logged in successfully about twenty minutes ago and things are still running normally. No fires or explosions have occurred and Satan has not shown up to demand repayment. I would still like to factory reset pretty much everything just to make sure I'm not sitting on a time bomb, and the stability of Debian sure sounds appealing, but I'm afraid to turn the thing off again in case this was just a fluke. And god knows I'm sick of troubleshooting mysterious problems by now. Thoughts, anyone?