Pinephone Pro does not start with RE button pressed

[R0bbi3Mack]

Did you get this figured out? I am having the same issue.

[dchang0]

I kind of had similar issues but not exactly the same and will share some things I learned:

I did struggle with the PPP doing absolutely nothing when the RE button was depressed and I pushed the power button. Through trial and error, I kind of figured out a proper order. Remove power cord, remove battery, do not depress any buttons. Insert microSD, insert battery. This is where it got kinda of iffy. Insert power cable (which should turn on the phone but didn't always do so for me), then quickly press RE button. The instructions say that you should press the RE button, THEN insert the power cable, but that didn't work for me. Also, in my case, inserting the power cable usually didn't turn on the phone for me, so I ended up having to press the power button while still depressing the RE button. If I was lucky, the red LED would come on, the phone would vibrate once, and then I would immediately release the RE button. Then the LED would turn yellow and the phone would vibrate twice, and I knew it was booting successfully.

One thing I kinda learned is that if I was holding the RE button down while inserting the power cable and the phone would stay dead, I could let go of the RE button for a second, then press it again, then press the power button and usually get it to boot.

I wish I could be more confident about exactly what to do, but once I got TowBoot installed, the issues went away and I don't have any reason to try to get back into that nightmarish semi-bricked state.

Do not hold the RE button too long (i.e. past the double-vibration), or the SPI and eMMC devices will not be available to whatever you boot into. As it were, I did succeed into booting into TowBoot from microSD, but it could not write to SPI because I had held the RE button too long, and the error was cryptic (it said "/dev/mtdblock0 not found").

I did have trouble booting (while holding the RE button) to various OS images on different microSD cards that should have booted. I never did figure out why those did not boot. Instead, I kept using dd to write different images onto the various microSD cards that I had until I got one that would boot. For me, the TowBoot spi.installer.img did work, and the factory Manjaro did work. It scared me because I thought I had bricked my PPP while trying the factory SailfishOS image (which comes with u-boot) and then installing Mobian via USB mode to write directly to the eMMC (this would mean that I had u-boot in the bootloader and Mobian on the eMMC, when the instructions clearly say that TowBoot is required for Mobian).

So, for now, I recommend that you try different microSD cards and bootable different OS images.