Last update bricked my pine phone :(

[lacriz]

Hello,

the last time I installed updates (from the Terminal), my pine phone froze after a couple of minutes.
I waited a really long time, was using wifi and connected to power.
I finally made a hard reset (pressed the power button for 20-some seconds), started it again and got -- nothing. Just a black screen and the LED constantly on in green.

I have arch installed on the eMMC.

So, I made a full backup months ago. My bad, I know.

I still would like to know if/how I can access my data that is (hopefully) still on the phone.
Can I access some kind of boot manager during startup?
Could I make a backup of the broken phone and get my data from that backup?
Could I roll-back to some kind of restore point (this would be ideal)?

Any help is appreciated!


   lacriz

[kqlnut]

Just flash Jumpdrive to an SD card, boot the phone with that card and connect it to a computer and then you can access the eMMC like any removable drive to backup your data before flashing a new image (I guess you have done this already to flash Arch in the first place).

[lacriz]

Just flash Jumpdrive to an SD card, boot the phone with that card and connect it to a computer and then you can access the eMMC like any removable drive to backup your data before flashing a new image (I guess you have done this already to flash Arch in the first place).

Great idea, thank you!
I just booted the pp with jumpdrive and connected it via usb to my mac.
Only the micro sd holding jumpdrive itself gets mounted in macos

So I tried

telnet 172.16.42.1

but it runs into a time out.
I wanted to run mount rootfs from telnet, but that seems impossible.



diskutil

I also tried mounting the eMMC (which I can see via the macos tool 'diskutil'):

diskutil mount readOnly /dev/disk3s2

Result:
Volume on disk3s2 failed to mount
Perhaps the operation is not supported (kDAReturnUnsupported)

[kqlnut]

I don't know which files system Arch uses, but maybe it's one that can't be mounted by MacOS (or not without extra steps)?

[lacriz]

I don't know which files system Arch uses, but maybe it's one that can't be mounted by MacOS (or not without extra steps)?

I think you are right. I can make a copy of the whole eMMC using dd on its unmounted drive, but macos cannot mount the eMMC.

I will try my luck using Linux next.

Thanks!

[lacriz]

fwiw, by now I:

a) managed to backup individual files from my home folder using jumpdrive and connecting to a Linux machine

b) switched to postmarketOS + phosh (to try something different).


All in all I took away 2 things:

1) It is quite easy to save data from a 'bricked' pine phone

2) arch seems too 'bleeding edge' (a.k.a. unstable) for my taste

[kqlnut]

Glad it worked out! I thought MacOS could at least mount ext4, but I just checked and it doesn't even support that, so accessing most distros' file systems is probably not easily done on a Mac.