Up to date guide on factory reset pinebook pro?

[jcarty]

I'm not very familiär with flashing or installing operating systems on this type of machine (eMMC). Is there any written guides on how to do it? The best I've seen is the discussion in this thread .Do I need need an SD card (I don't have a spare)?

[wdt]

OK, my experiences
yes you most likely need another sd card, unless you are so lucky you can get a usb boot
This is a bit hit or miss
Whatever block device you are writing to has to be unmounted, and you are writing to whole block device, not a partition
I prefer something like .... xzcat someImage.xz | dd of=/dev/emmc bs=1M status=progress
You can unxz, takes more space and the original xz is deleted at the end
DO NOT neglect the bs=, writing 512B chunks takes forever, not so good for media either
All images have a uboot package in 1st 16M, all uboots are not created equal, it's a bit of a crap-shoot
You can rsync a booted sd, exclude sys dev proc run ,, make empty directories for them on the target
(and take care where "/" go,, ie rsync -a sd/bin/ emmc/bin, you don't want /bin/bin)
(and edit fstab extlinux.conf and mbr partition table to suit emmc AND install some uboot, 2 or 3 files)
all this done as root of course
Do use a reasonable quality sd card, lots of crap out there