Pinebook Pro not powering on

[firefox-58]

I think there is an onboard switch for disabling the EMMC?

Furthermore You can easily re-flash the EMMC with an USB-EMMC adapter available in the PineStore

[lavender]

I also have a Pinebook Pro that currently will not power up.  Here is the details of my own experience.

Up until early this month my Pinebook Pro was working more or less correctly.  It was using a copy of Debian which I had installed using the Daniel Thompson installer.  It sometimes would not successfully boot, but shutting the power down and then trying again would usually get it to boot.  I never had to do the power off and retry more than twice to get it to boot.  Then the following sequence of events happened.

1.  I did my periodic check for Debian updates early in November 2021 and saw that there were new kernel packages from the Daniel Thompson repository, so I went and installed them.  Apparently this was a mistake.

2.  My Pinebook Pro would no longer boot and would not get any futher than the boot monitor prompt.

3.  I tried to fix this by booting the Manjaro installer, interrupting that installer, manually mounted the partitions on the EMMC at /mnt, did a chroot to /mnt, and then installing the Buster versions of the Daniel Thompson kernel packages.   This did not improve matters.  The Pinebook Pro still would not boot.

4.  After a bit of more fiddling, I decided I would try using the "Official Debian Installer" that I had heard of to see if I would get a better result.  

5.  I downloaded the SD card installer from https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm6...rd-images/ on November 15.  I concatenated the uncompressed firmware and partition images to make an install image as described by the README there and wrote that to an SD card.

6.  When I booted this, the installation started, but it complained that it was missing the firmware for the wireless card.  I found the necessary firmware related files on the net and copied them to the root directory of the SD card install image.

7.   At this point the official Debian installer started up.  I have used the Debian installer on many other computers and the installation process using this SD card seemed exactly the same as the standard Debian installer experience.

8.  At the end of the installation, the installer told me to remove the installation medium and then tell it to reboot into my new operating system.

9.  So I told the installer to do the reboot and the screen went black.  The screen stayed black for several minutes, so I assumed that the computer had gotten stuck somehow.   So I held down the power button for a long time to force a power off.  Perhaps this was a mistake.

10.  Then I pressed the power button to power the computer back up.  The power indicator LED briefly flashed red for a fraction of a second and then went off again.  Unfortunately, this fraction of a second of red was the last time that the power indicator LED ever came on.

11.  I tried powering on several times but there was no sign of activity.  The only indication that the laptop was alive at all was that the red charging light on the side of the laptop was lit.  Note that I have been powering the laptop with a USB cable if that matters.

12.  Charging the laptop seems to work correctly.  The red charge light comes on for a while and then goes off again.

13.  So I spent a while looking at this forum to see if I could get any ideas of what to do.

14.  Here is a list of things I have tried:
    A.  Long pressing the power button.  For up to a minute or more.
    B.  Pressing the reset button inside the case.
    C.  Removing and reseating the EMMC.  Pressed the reset button.
    D.  Trying to boot with the EMMC not installed.  Pressed the reset button.
    E.  Trying to boot with the EMMC installed, but with the EMMC enable switch in the disabled position.  I have now put it back into the enabled position.  Pressed the reset button.

15.  I have not tried zeroing out the SPI chip.  However, I do not know if the official Debian installer even uses SPI or not. 

So I am stuck with a Pinebook Pro whose power indicator LED never comes on.  I would buy a new one, but they are presumably out of stock indefinitely due to the chip shortage.

Is there anything else I can try or should I consider the laptop dead?

Bill Lavender

[lavender]

Here is one extra addition to my message from earlier today (2021-11-25).

16. I disconnected the internal battery cable for 2 1/2 days and then plugged it back in. The Pinebook Pro still would not power on.

Bill Lavender

[KC9UDX]

Please don't confuse powering up with booting. The only way to tell if a non-booting PBP is powering on is either with a multimeter with the bottom off, or by sensing heat from the CPU area, hoping that the CPU was not set to a very low power mode prior to a software crash.

So unless you have actually confirmed that power is not on, it's better to say that it's not booting, rather than not powering up.

[lavender]

What does it mean if the Power Indicator LED never comes on?

Bill Lavender

[KC9UDX]

What does it mean if the Power Indicator LED never comes on?

Bill Lavender

Software hasn't turned it on.  The "power indicator" doesn't directly indicate power.  It's turned on in software.  So if there's a crash, or software just decides never to turn it on, or if the software isn't even there, the lamp never lights, yet the processor will still run.

[poVoq]

I had similar issues some months back. Since switching to the bsp uboot (available in the Manjaro repos) the issue went away completly and my PBP boots everytime without problems.

[wdt]

My guess, (likely 98%) is that you have a 'bad' uboot on emmc
If you have a KNOWN good uSD (I recommend updated mrfixit), ,,remove emmc,, insert sd
do various resets, in order (testing after each)......hard pwr-off(7s) hard reset (20+s) , button within
If it doesn't work, do it AGAIN
Or, rather less likely, it may be really dead
Do remember that a quick tap on pwr is not enough to turn it on, press 1+s,
(and I have seen uboots (not many) that take 5+s to turn on led)

[pineymousepad]

My PBP seems to not be charging while powered off. I recently selected Hibernate and it did nothing, then shut down. Day later my PBP would power on and then suddenly off, I thought it was broken until I plugged in the OEM charger cord and turned it on to see it was 0 battery WTF it wasnt before.

How to fix? Just started using PBP this week and this seems really broken...

[KC9UDX]

My PBP seems to not be charging while powered off. I recently selected Hibernate and it did nothing, then shut down. Day later my PBP would power on and then suddenly off, I thought it was broken until I plugged in the OEM charger cord and turned it on to see it was 0 battery WTF it wasnt before.

How to fix? Just started using PBP this week and this seems really broken...

I don't know why, but it is widely reported that when the battery is totally exhausted, the only way to recover is to charge by USB-C.