08-05-2023, 05:42 AM
(This post was last modified: 08-08-2023, 01:20 PM by LienRag.)
I installed Phosh on my new¹ pinephone but now I can't remember the pin/password.
And I thought that I installed it on the SD card but it appears that I actually installed it on the EMMC.
I tried to reinstall with sxmo but the phone won't boot on the SD card, it keeps booting on the EMMC.
Everybody tells me that it should boot on the SD card by default, but it doesn't (even when I press the volume button down at start).
Am I doing something wrong ?
How to check what's the problem ?
¹ Well, new since many months now, but I haven't used it yet
So a GNU friend helped me and installed Tow-boot on the phone (I remember that at the first install I didn't understand fully what was Tow-boot nor what exactly I was supposed to do, so I'm confident that I did not install it myself from a specific SD card, but that's all I can be sure about).
After that it does boot from the SD card.
But today I used the Phosh Installer tar image (dd'd on a SD card) to test that, and I was particularly careful to choose "install on the SD card" after having been burned once.
It asked me whether it should wipe the card, and I chose "yes". I also chose to encrypt the filesystem.
But even though I chose to install the OS on the SD card, it actually installed it on the EMMC...
So I guess that the first time also I didn't make any mistake, it's the installer who lied to me.
And I guess it wiped out tow-boot, because now it refuses to boot on the same SD card that I used to install it (nor on another where I dd'd another tar image).
At least it boots on the tow-boot SD card if I put it in the phone.
Also I now remember the new password - I can use the system installed if I want to.
But I bought the Pinephone in order to test the various available OS, so what should I do now ?
The Tow-boot SD card asks me whether I want to wipe the EMMC or to install Tow-boot on the boot sector of the EMMC, will the second option leave the OS installed on the EMMC functional ?
Thanks, I wasn't aware of this image.
But though it may be useful later, it's not the answer to my problem.
To wit :
- Why did the installer lie to me and installed the OS on the EMMC after telling me it would install it on the SD card ?
- Do all installers lie in the same way ?
- If I install tow-boot on the EMMC like the Tow-boot installer proposes, will it remove or create problems to the Phosh that is currently on the EMMC ?
Yes, that is what happened.
I thought that the installer was loaded in memory, which means that it indeed would have been able to install itself on the SD card.
A bit surprising indeed, but there wouldn't be that many other options if one wanted to install on the SD card from a SD card.
And imho, less weird than offering to install the OS on the SD card and then installing it on the EMMC...
It should either not have offered the source device as a target device at all or at least errored when you tried to proceed with the installation with those settings, not silently done something different than what you had explicitly told it. So I would say that that is a clear bug in the installer, even if you asked it to do something unreasonable.
