what is the magic dd incantation to copy the system from the sd card to the emmc?

[calinb]

I had trouble installing it the conventional way to the emmc - where you copy the compressed system image to the emmc.

The 'conventional way' (on Armbian) would be to use the nand-sata-install tool (which, IIRC, may also be available from armbian-config (not sure)).

Different SBCs boot in all different ways, which is part of the problem with them.  This is all very different from x86 you may be used to.

Having said all of the above, some other people were also reporting this issue at Armbian forums (Werner gives a clue in that thread about how it works), so maybe something went wrong.  I do believe it used to work at some point.

Edit: I just realized you are probably the same calinb from the thread I linked.  Keep up the good work, and I hope to be able to help you some more very soon (just need to pick up my new PBP from post office in a couple days).

Yes--I posted to the Armbian forum thread. WDT has been very helpful here in filling in the gaps in my knowledge but I don't have time to work on the problem right now. I think it has something to do with initrd generation (initrd doesn't seem to be able to read the eMMC memory and reports (I think) that it can't find the UUID for my eMMC that I put in armbianEnv.txt.

armbianEnv.txt:

Code:

verbosity=1
bootlogo=false
extraargs=systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0
overlay_prefix=rockchip
fdtfile=rockchip/rk3399-pinebook-pro.dtb
rootdev=UUID=f57dd6bf-3737-40f9-95b0-376895bc2055
rootfstype=ext4
usbstoragequirks=0x2537:0x1066:u,0x2537:0x1068:u

I have PCM720's Uboot on eMMC (works fine for Manjaro) and Armbian /boot is on SD card.
Hopefully this screen shot link of the Armbian failure works:
Ambian_eMMC_boot failure.