Broken Boot

[djhnsn]

Something you could try, with balena
Write the image to an USB stick (make sure stick has nothing on it that you care about)
Check stick with fdisk, 1st part should be 32768 or 62500 sectors in
Stick should be generally readable
OR
xzcat xz_image |dd of=/dev/mmcblkX bs=1M status=progress
----
My experience with armbian is 50-50 viz bootability
try original mrfixit, quite reliable
---
and, BTW, every time you put a non-bootable sd in (and try to boot)
it may need the 8s,,20s dance (with a new card in obviously, 'bad' card OUT)
With no media, you will get nothing, ever, will think device dead

Thanks. I flashed the manjaro image to a usb stick and it started at 62500, and was mounted with 2 partitions readable. 

I was looking in some other threads, and I found someone with a similar situation getting it to boot by flashing an image to emmc. Since the adapter is supposed to arrive tomorrow, I will leave it alone until then. I'll have a look at mrfixit if these other things don't work.

Edit: I decided not to wait, and flashed mrfixit onto a 64gig samsung evo select. It still did not boot. I did hold the powerbutton down until I counted to 27, since I have the back cover off, I also pressed the reset button.