PBP won't boot from eMMC or SD card: a saga

[archaicmeander]

Alright, so I won't say I'm 100% out of the woods for fear of jinxing myself, but I managed to flash mrfixit's Debian onto my eMMC and my PBP has booted into it as expected. I haven't rebooted it yet, so I don't know if it's fiendishly trying to lull me into a false sense of security, but considering the Manjaro installation is gone and it's booting without the SD card, the situation seems promising. The only problem is a high-pitched sound it started making the other day during the troubleshooting, which other forums tell me probably has to do with the power supply and is definitely annoying, but not indicative of a serious problem.

For posterity, I'll try to go over my "solution", but honestly I bet 90% of this was my fault somehow, and I don't even know how I finally managed to boot to my SD card successfully - it was a real mess of mashing the power button and the reset/recovery buttons in whatever order felt right in the moment. But, for the record, I tried the previous advice from this thread and then some, and once I finally got booted into the SD with Debian, I did the following:

1. Downloaded mrfixit's Debian for PBP from https://github.com/mrfixit2001/debian_desktop/releases. This is also what I used to flash the image onto the SD card.

2. Because I had to have the eMMC switched off internally in order to boot from the SD, and switched it back on only after fully booting from the SD, the eMMC was not being properly recognized. Following the instructions at https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=...le_Storage, I ran (as root):

Code:

# echo fe330000.sdhci >/sys/bus/platform/drivers/sdhci-arasan/unbind
# echo fe330000.sdhci >/sys/bus/platform/drivers/sdhci-arasan/bind

I don't understand what this did, but afterwards, when using $lsblk or $dh to list available devices, the eMMC would be included and could therefore be flashed to. I made sure to note my eMMC's number with $lsblk before flashing - for me it was mmcblk1 but I gather this can vary with different kernels, so don't take it for granted. I also went back to the normal user account after this but that probably doesn't make a difference.

3. Entered the directory with the Debian image and followed the instructions from https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=8229 - but replacing the .img's filename with the one I downloaded. I unzipped the image, and AFTER DOUBLE CHECKING THE DEVICE NUMBER (seriously that part is stupid crazy important), flashed it to eMMC:

Code:

$ unxz pinebookpro-debian-desktop-mrfixit-191226.img.xz
$ sudo dd if=pinebookpro-debian-desktop-mrfixit-191226.img of=/dev/mmcblk1 status=progress
$ sync

Not sure what $sync did but it was attested at https://old.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/...u_on_emmc/

4. After the flash finished up, I powered down, removed the SD card, and powered on again to a glorious Debian login screen. I logged in with default credentials, and rejoiced.

Anyone else who's having the problems I had...well, best of luck to you. Thanks to everyone for the help! I'm off to explore Debian.