Broken boot loader
#1
I was trying to distro-hop without an eMMC adapter (there's one in the mail but I got impatient) but my SD card wasn't being recognized. Being the clown that I am I thought it was an issue with uboot booting from eMMC before the SD card even though I know this not to be the default boot order. Being an even bigger fool (and in my defense after about an hour of troubleshooting and a long day of work) I decided to break rule 1 of computing and blindly copied a command I found online thinking it would solve my issue.

I then ran the following command in u-boot:  
Code:
setenv bootcmd 'run sdboot' ; saveenv ; reboot

The issue I'm now running into is that the bootloader on my SPI is borked and I don't know what the default bootcmd environment variable is. I know literally nothing about bootloader syntax and can't even read the output of 'help' as it scrolls by too quickly (is there not a 'less' equivalent for the boot loader cli?). 
You could say I'm a bit out of my element!

Is there a way to reset my u-boot and/or does anyone know what the default bootcmd environment variable is?
Alternately, how do I boot using the u-boot cli? My eMMC is still visible using the the mmc command, but I don't know how to access it or boot from it.
Thanks in advance.


SOLUTION:
(08-12-2022, 02:47 PM)jpalus Wrote:
(07-27-2022, 11:20 AM)Tango Drango Wrote: does anyone know what the default bootcmd environment variable is?

You can always restore default environment with:
Code:
env default -a

Note that it restores settings for current "session", to persist do:
Code:
env save

For more details see:
https://u-boot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/...d/env.html
  Reply
#2
(07-27-2022, 11:20 AM)Tango Drango Wrote: I was trying to distro-hop without an eMMC adapter (there's one in the mail but I got impatient) but my SD card wasn't being recognized. Being the clown that I am I thought it was an issue with uboot booting from eMMC before the SD card even though I know this not to be the default boot order. Being an even bigger fool (and in my defense after about an hour of troubleshooting and a long day of work) I decided to break rule 1 of computing and blindly copied a command I found online thinking it would solve my issue.

I then ran the following command in u-boot:  
Code:
setenv bootcmd 'run sdboot' ; saveenv ; reboot

The issue I'm now running into is that the bootloader on my SPI is borked and I don't know what the default bootcmd environment variable is. I know literally nothing about bootloader syntax and can't even read the output of 'help' as it scrolls by too quickly (is there not a 'less' equivalent for the boot loader cli?). 
You could say I'm a bit out of my element!

Is there a way to reset my u-boot and/or does anyone know what the default bootcmd environment variable is?
Alternately, how do I boot using the u-boot cli? My eMMC is still visible using the the mmc command, but I don't know how to access it or boot from it.
Thanks in advance.

Don't have much time to make this pretty but I'm posting my solution here for others who follow need similar help.

I decided I would just start fresh and re-flash my SPI. The references I used were as follows:
https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/NOOB#E...riting_SPI - also contains link to the requisite img file for SPI flashing
https://wiki.pine64.org/images/4/45/PBPL_S.jpg - I used this and the following link to completely wipe my SPI
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pr...le_method) - read this one carefully, actually read all of them carefully.

In the end it re-flashed successfully and I can now boot fine.
  Reply
#3
Lucky for you. Mine even refused to boot from SD which eliminate any option to do any recovery. So I simply put in the trash.
  Reply
#4
(07-27-2022, 11:20 AM)Tango Drango Wrote: does anyone know what the default bootcmd environment variable is?

You can always restore default environment with:
Code:
env default -a

Note that it restores settings for current "session", to persist do:
Code:
env save

For more details see:
https://u-boot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/...d/env.html
  Reply
#5
(08-12-2022, 02:47 PM)jpalus Wrote:
(07-27-2022, 11:20 AM)Tango Drango Wrote: does anyone know what the default bootcmd environment variable is?

You can always restore default environment with:
Code:
env default -a

Note that it restores settings for current "session", to persist do:
Code:
env save

For more details see:
https://u-boot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/...d/env.html

This is exactly what I was looking for - much appreciated. Must've been searching for all the wrong things to miss that in the u-boot documentation.
  Reply


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