Pinephone is dead (sort of)

[thorensjubilee]

Hello Zebulon,

I tried flashing the SD card with the factory test image using Balena Etcher, and the flash came out all wrong. I did unzip it first. It came out saying that there was a fault with the flash, but that it didn't know exactly what. I only have one more SD card left. Shall I try that? The phone was dead, it didn't respond to anything.

Chris

[moodroid]

Hi Chris,

I can see that Zebulon is giving you some great help, so feel free to ignore this. But just some thoughts/questions that may help...

Which factory test image were you using?

Did you put your SD card into a card reader and plug it into your computer and then flash with Etcher?

If the last flash failed, could you not just try it again (same SD card), and disable the Anti Virus software before you start?

Good luck

[thorensjubilee]

Hello Moodroid,

I'm using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, in a factory test image called https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_S...ry_Test_OS I put the SD card in my card reader and used Balena Etcher to flash the image to the SD card. I'm not using any anti virus at all. I am now going to try it in Windows 10 with the anti virus switched off.

Chris

[thorensjubilee]

Hello,

I've just done another SD card flash on Windows 10 with the anti virus switched off. It decompressed before flashing. It said that it was a successful flashing. I put it in the pinephone and........nothing. What have I done wrong? Or is it bricked?

Chris

---

Hello,

I have just started my computer, my desktop Ubuntu and connected the pinephone to it via USB. It has a signal! It has Postmarket OS on it. The EMMC is greyed out, presumably because it doesn't work. I'm running the other tests now and it is halting around EG25. It has been on this for some 10 minutes.

Chris

[moodroid]

Hi,

Well, I wasn't really sure what should happen, so have just tried it myself.

I flashed https://images.postmarketos.org/pinephon...t64.img.xz

Then I put it in my Pinephone and booted up...

At first, nothing happened, so I charged my phone for bit first, then tried again - so I'd make sure you have a decent amount of charge in your phone.

So, trying it again a bit later, at first it vibrates, then 'PostmarketOS - Loading' appears for a while, and finally, you get a set of menu options for all the different tests.

Good luck.

---

That sounds a bit more promising
Keep at it!

---

The 'Flash to eMMC' option is greyed out for me too when I boot into the factory test, and there's nothing wrong with my emmc. That's a pity, as that wuld be a useful test for you. The only thing I can think, is you either need a full battery, there's some secret way of accessing it, or they've removed that option.

Now that you can flash your SD card, I guess you could try installing Mobian on your SD card, like Zebulon suggested. You may be able to get some useful info once you boot into that. Or you could wait for Zebulon/someone else for more suggestions.

Good luck

[thorensjubilee]

Hello Moodroid,

Thanks for doing the same thing! It's good to hear that EMMC is greyed out on your machine as well. I don't know what to do about my battery, I've no idea what state it's in. I'll flash mobian on my SD card and see what happens.

Chris

[Zebulon Walton]

I've never used Balena Etcher so don't know if there's something there that might be causing a problem. I use the old "dd" program that Linux inherited from ancient Unix systems. (My circa 1981 Unix manual can largely serve as a guide for dd and other utililities in modern Linux!) So what you might want to do is boot up on your Ubuntu flash drive and try using dd to flash your SD card instead of Etcher.

You need first to determine positively what the device node (/dev/sdX) is for your SD card. You can do this a couple of ways. I usually just monitor the syslog file as previously documented to pick up the device node. You could also use the Gnome Disks or GParted software to identify it. You want to be absolutely sure because "dd" has no safety net, it will do exactly what you tell it to do whether that is what you actually want or not. (It will happily over-write your system disk if you give it the wrong device!) If using Gnome Disks, this is the kind of thing you'll see to identify your SD card, which in my case is a 16GB card:



So after determining the SD card device node enter the following command, substituting the actual image filename for filename.img and the actual device node for /dev/sdX:

          sudo dd if=filename.img of=/dev/sdX bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync

Due to the simplicity of dd's operation this will create a byte-for-byte copy of the image file on the SD card, and flush buffers out before returning to the command prompt, without question as long as there are no read or write errors. (Be certain to wait for dd to drop back to the command prompt. Even if it says 100% done, that just means that the last part of the file has filled the buffer but dd will still be writing to your SD card until the command prompt is back.)

[thorensjubilee]

I've never used Balena Etcher so don't know if there's something there that might be causing a problem. I use the old "dd" program that Linux inherited from ancient Unix systems. (My circa 1981 Unix manual can largely serve as a guide for dd and other utililities in modern Linux!) So what you might want to do is boot up on your Ubuntu flash drive and try using dd to flash your SD card instead of Etcher.

You need first to determine positively what the device node (/dev/sdX) is for your SD card. You can do this a couple of ways. I usually just monitor the syslog file as previously documented to pick up the device node. You could also use the Gnome Disks or GParted software to identify it. You want to be absolutely sure because "dd" has no safety net, it will do exactly what you tell it to do whether that is what you actually want or not. (It will happily over-write your system disk if you give it the wrong device!) If using Gnome Disks, this is the kind of thing you'll see to identify your SD card, which in my case is a 16MB card:



So after determining the SD card device node enter the following command, substituting the actual image filename for filename.img and the actual device node for /dev/sdX:

          sudo dd if=filename.img of=/dev/sdX bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync

Due to the simplicity of dd's operation this will create a byte-for-byte copy of the image file on the SD card without question as long as there are no read or write errors.

Hello Zebulon,

I have successfully etched Mobian onto my SD card! It boots! But not from the EEMC. I have Mobian on my pinephone I thank you sincerely for all your help. THANK YOU!

My one issue is what to do about the EEMC. I have noticed a reset button on my phone. What is it and how does it work?

Chris

[wibble]

My one issue is what to do about the EEMC. I have noticed a reset button on my phone. What is it and how does it work?

Now you can run mobian from the uSD you should be able to access and run tests on the eMMC.

The reset button triggers an instant hard reboot by operating the CPU's reset line. It's a safer way to reboot than just pulling the battery as the stock modem firmware has a chance of corruption if you pull the power without giving it an orderly shutdown as it includes a writeable internal filesystem. Biktorgj's open modem firmware doesn't have that problem.

[thorensjubilee]

My one issue is what to do about the EEMC. I have noticed a reset button on my phone. What is it and how does it work?

Now you can run mobian from the uSD you should be able to access and run tests on the eMMC.

The reset button triggers an instant hard reboot by operating the CPU's reset line. It's a safer way to reboot than just pulling the battery as the stock modem firmware has a chance of corruption if you pull the power without giving it an orderly shutdown as it includes a writeable internal filesystem. Biktorgj's open modem firmware doesn't have that problem.

Hello wibble,

Will it "repair" the EEMC if I use it?

Chris