Need Advice for Wiping eMMC on Dead LCD Pinebook Pro

[calinb]

There is a problem with a uSD card you have never used,,
how will it know what ap (access point) and password?
Now if you have a usb->ethernet dongle
I have one, a "9700" (2nd half of usbid)....works fine,
<snip>

Thanks, wdt!

Yes. Without a USB > Ethernet dongle, this is a problem.

From https://docs.armbian.com/

Ethernet adapter with DHCP and SSH server ready on default port (22)
Wireless adapter with DHCP ready (if present) but disabled. You can use armbian-config to connect to your router or create an access point

In theory, an SD-booted image could enable both SSH and USB networking. On my Pinephone, Mobian enables USB on a fresh boot, but SSH is disabled by default and the service must be started.

This entire task would be trivial on the Pinephone or a Pinetab, because Jumpdrive booted from SD could be used to mount the eMMC via USB on another system. I tried the Pinetab Jumpdrive on my Pinebook Pro and it doesn't boot. I guess I could try the Pinephone version too, but I doubt it will boot either.

Does vt (control-alt-F3) work on an SD card boot? Maybe I could use it blindly to enable SSH or maybe I could use it to enable SSH on my eMMC Manjaro.

Also from Armbian. [url=https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Getting-Started/#how-to-connect-to-wireless][/url]

How to connect to wireless?
Required condition: a board with onboard or supported 3rd party wireless adapter on USB
If you know what is your wireless SSID:

nmtui-connect SSID

Maybe I could type the SSD for my open "guest" network blindly on vt.

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I'm in with SSH!  

My Pinephone dock didn't work on my Pinebook Pro for HDMI video but it works for Ethernet!

I booted https://armbian.tnahosting.net/dl/pinebo...top.img.xz from an SD card (because years ago I used Ubuntu with XFCE and liked it and I'm an MX-Linux/XFCE fan now and thought I'd like to try Ubuntu Focal anyway.

I plugged the Ethernet cable into my router and found the PBP and its IP address on my router's web server "attached devices" page. Then I used SSH to connect to it as root (as described in the Armbian docs I linked earlier in this thread). Armbian had me setup locality and a non-root account, etc. so it will be ready to boot to the desktop after I get my PBP LCD screen repaired under warranty.

I think I'll archive my /home/<user> directory to the Armbian SD card and then delete it from the PBP's eMMC for the warranty work. Then I can easily restore it later.

If my Pinephone dock Ethernet had not worked, I would have tried to mount bootable SD cards on my other Linux machine and edit config and service management files to try to get SSH and some kind of networking (USB) running. Either that or some kind of chroot from my Pinephone into it or maybe dig into the Jumpdrive source and try to get it running on the PBP--all of which are probably large efforts.

Thanks carlosqueso and wdt! You gave me some good ideas. Armbian worked great and I would have tried an mrfixit SD image next.