Pinebook Pro won´t boot either from eMMC or microSD

[zinksaucier]

i have the same trouble with my pb pro, but i am out!
i destroyed this piece of crap! I am so pissed off this garbage.

the support is the worst i ever know, send a ticket about six weeks ago and no answer!

i have installed different linux types on every units without a problem and soldered ram into xboxes, but this shitty unit is lightning orange for hours.

where is the fucking manual???

destroy what destroys you

[KC9UDX]

Support?? I bought mine because *I'd* support it.

If you get an orange light, there's nothing wrong with the hardware, nothing for "support" to do about it.

[robieguarneros]

Until you can get a new SD card, try a different image.  Even try the NetBSD image I linked to.  It should boot.  I don't have a way right now to verify that the Debian image that I linked to is actually the right one anymore.  Or try one of the other OSs in the wiki links.  Android, ChromeOS, or something.

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Here's a silly question: Are you unarchiving the image before flashing it?

I'm not familiar with Etcher at all, and the documentation reads like nonsense to me.  It looks like it was sloppily translated to English.

Yes, I am unarchiving the image. I just got a new sd card. I’ll be retrying today and I’ll let you know if it works.

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How to tell if SD card image is OK??  If you have a linux box & card reader,, I have NO idea how to do this in win
Mount and check the 2 partitions (in a file manager), open some text files, in /etc,,, extlinux/extlinux.conf
If it all looks OK, probably is
Now the 1st  16 MB is a little harder,, use dd to "yank" them out, compare with md5sum,, like this
dd if=/dev/SD(sdb?,sdc?,whatever) of=16SD bs=1M count=16 (sorry sdb? might not be clear,, ONLY sdb OR sdc, not sdb1)
cd to image
xzcat pinebookpro-debian-desktop-mrfixit191226.img.xz |dd of=16img bs=1M count=16
mv 16img (to same directory where 16SD is)
md5sum 16SD 16img  (and will display vertically lined up 1 above other, should be identical)

I don’t have a Linux box and card reader, ill try and do this in windows. Anyway, I just got a new sd and I’ll be trying with that one. Thanks!

[KC9UDX]

Sounds like a great excuse to "live USB boot" Linux on your Windows machine.

[wdt]

Etcher is "smart" enough to know if image is compressed, has an internal xzcat or zcat
And it can "burn" a uncompressed image too
How do I know? After I burn an image, I always check with fdisk, just to see if it looks "right"
Obviously, if the compressed image was "burned", as is, fdisk would make no sense at all

[robieguarneros]

I finally managed to solve it. At the end, I tried all the things suggested in the forum but none worked for me. Today I finally received my eMMC adapter and I just flashed a new image to the eMMC and it booted. It fixed all my booting problems. Thanks for all the suggestions and the help! 

Also, at the end I ended up using Manjaro with i3. So far I’m so happy with the performance.

[boggle]

I finally managed to solve it. At the end, I tried all the things suggested in the forum but none worked for me. Today I finally received my eMMC adapter and I just flashed a new image to the eMMC and it booted. It fixed all my booting problems. Thanks for all the suggestions and the help! 

Also, at the end I ended up using Manjaro with i3. So far I’m so happy with the performance

What exactly does using the adapter accomplish VS just flashing the eemc via SD card? 

I've had this same issue since I bought the pbp in May. I'm about to throw it in the trash because there doesn't seem to be a solution. Hopefully your solution works for me as well.

[KC9UDX]

Nothing at all unless the SD card isn't working, or for some reason you're just not flashing the eMMC correctly. Of course, if the eMMC is trashed so that you have to disable it to boot from SD, you have to enable it to flash it; and it can be very tricky to get the timing right, turning it on during boot.

If nothing else the eMMC adaptor is not expensive. I'm pretty sure I bought one. But I lost track of it. I've been in a pickle scrambling the eMMC numerous times but never needed to resort to removing it to flash it.

[axel]

Hey guys,

After using my PBP happily for months now it doesn't boot anymore =(

Yesterday I  installed latest updates (Manjaro KDE) via package manager - afterwards it felt a little sluggish so I decided to shut it down in the evening (to reboot the next day).

When I press the power button, the power LED is orange for a few seconds an then turns green - but the screen stays off. I noticed that I can press caps lock and num lock (fn+f10) and it toggles the appropriate LEDs.

I also tried booting from SD card (also Manjaro KDE) and at first it prompted me for system set up info (user name, pw, root pw, locale, tz etc) but then was just showing the Manjaro logo and a spinner for at least half an hour.

Any help much appreciated!

EDIT: not sure if this is booting from SD card right now or not but I'm getting EXT4-fs errors regarding "Detected aborted Journal" - did I shutdown the PBP to soon after booting from SD card?

[wdt]

This is not so clear
>EDIT: not sure if this is booting from SD card right now or not but I'm getting EXT4-fs errors
>regarding "Detected aborted Journal" - did I shutdown the PBP to soon after booting from SD card?
So...you must have a screen to see this????
lsblk,, shows where "/" is,,, boot0 and boot1 are on emmc
The spinner, you may have needed to press esc to get to a screen
Yes, the toggling caps, num are a good thing, try to get to vt (virtual terminal),, ctrl-alt-F2
If you didn't put on new uboot, maybe downgrade kernel
If you have vt or by chroot,, cd /var/cache/pacman/pkgs ; ls -l linux-pi* ; pacman -U whatever,,
maybe the headers too,, ls -l linux-he*